The French of England: Annotated Short Bibliography and Resources

FUNDAMENTAL RESOURCES

  • Anglo-Norman Dictionary A superbly user-friendly online dictionary at the online Anglo-Norman hub that has changed the Oxford English Dictionary’s etymologies for many words in English as well as the earliest recorded dates of many French words used in England. It is important for all study of English and French. On the site are many of W. Rothwell’s lexicographic studies, a database of source texts, introductions to Anglo-Norman, the annual David Trotter memorial lecture, and much else.
  • Dean, Ruth J., with the collaboration of Maureen B. M. Boulton, Manual of Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts, ANTS, OP 3 (London, 1999). An indispensable listing of texts, manuscripts and editions vital for AN research as well as deeply informative for even the casual reader. The single most important work for constructing the literary field many aspects of which are still underexplored. Some 986 items are catalogued, ranging from major works of romance, chanson de geste, historiographical, hagiographical writing, treatises, encyclopaedias, fabliaux, lyrics etc to individual prayers in psalters and other books into the fifteenth century. Miss Dean, a palaeographer, linguist, and literary critic who published the volume in her 90s, spent 50 years looking at Anglo-Norman manuscripts. Subscribers to the Anglo-Norman Text Society get a copy at reduced rate.
  • ARLIMA (Les Archives de littérature du Moyen Âge) The ARLIMA bibliography increasingly includes insular French works in its database: it is not always thorough about the English-language bibliography, but it can still be a very useful resource, listing MSS, editions, secondary works, and sometimes updating Dean with Boulton.
  • The French of England, in Oxford Online Bibliographies, Medieval Studies, ed. Thelma Fenster: DOI: 10.1093/OBO/9780195396584-0082.
  • The Anglo-Norman Text Society ANTS publishes major high quality scholarly editions of Anglo-Norman primary texts, allowing subscribed members to receive each year’s text edition, and anything published in the Occasional Publications and Plain Texts series also run by ANTS. A bargain: these books would be much more expensive if bought on the open market. For information, membership and a series of useful links to medieval French dictionaries and other sites, go to http://www.anglo-norman-texts.net/ The secretary of ANTS is Prof. Daron Burrows of the French Department at the University of Oxford UK: daron.burrows@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk and the first port of call to register for an ANTS subscription.
  • The Fordham French of England Website This site is one of several Fordham sites on medieval Frenches (all housed at the Center for Medieval Studies, where you’ll also find The French of Outremer (i.e the Mediterranean uses of French in trading, the crusades and governance in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem) and the archived site for French of Italy [once despised in nationalizing philology, hybrid Italo-French works are receiving increasing attention and include some notable works, such as the travels of Marco Polo]). The French of England site includes information, links to other useful websites and bibliographies on the French of England (among them a valuable bibliography on historical genres and documents of record by Maryanne Kowaleski and Rebecca Slitt which gives a sense of the francophone documentary corpus of medieval England, itself drawn on very illuminatingly alongside literary records in the Anglo-Norman Dictionary.

ANTHOLOGIES

  • Bliss, Jane, ed., An Anglo-Norman Reader. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2018. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0110. A valuable anthology for anyone beginning to explore Anglo-Norman/French of England literature.
  • Jeffrey, David L. and Brian J. Levy, ed. The Anglo-Norman Lyric: An Anthology. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1990. Translations and valuable explications of a wide and varied range of lyrics.
  • Wogan-Browne, J., T. Fenster and D. W. Russell, Vernacular Literary Theory from the French of Medieval England: Texts and Translations, c. 1120-c. 1450. Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2016, pprbk 2017, ebook 2018. An ‘argued’ anthology, offering a wide range of excerpts (freshly edited from single manuscripts) in which medieval texts discuss their self-presentation and strategies, interpellate their audiences and position their material. Includes a substantial introduction, essays on literature and prosody, Middle English versions of text extracts, a glossary, timelines, bibliography, and lists of alternative arrangements of the extracts. A prequel/sequel to The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, c. 1280-1520, ed. Wogan-Browne, Watson et al. (Penn State Press and Exeter University Press, 1999).

OTHER WORKS: LANGUAGE/CULTURE/HISTORY

  • Ailes, M. and A. Putter. ‘The French of Medieval England.” In European Francophonie: The Social, Political and Cultural History of a Prestige Language, ed. V. Rjéoutski, G. Argent, D. Offord, 51-78. Bern: 2014. Valuable overview.
  • Baswell, C., C. Cannon, K. Kerby-Fulton, J. Wogan-Browne. “Competing Archives: French and its Cultural Locations in Medieval England.” Speculum 90.3 (2015): 635-700. Demonstrates the different stories shaped by our choices of archives in research.
  • Busby, Keith. Codex and Context: Reading Old French Narrative Verse in Manuscript, 2 vols., Faux Titre 221, 222. Amsterdam: 2002. Important study of among other things, the geography of the codex, the immense mobility of medieval texts, and their plurality of identity and function.
  • _____, French in Medieval Ireland, Ireland in Medieval French: The Paradox of Two Worlds. Turnhout: Brepols, 2017. A monumental and fascinating study: the first on such a scale.
  • ______, and Christophe Kleinhenz, eds. Medieval Multilingualism: The Francophone World and its Neighbours. Turnhout, Brepols, 2010. Gives a useful sense of the range of medieval French, the great vernacular lingua franca of the central and later Middle Ages.
  • Butterfield, Ardis. The Familar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Powerful study of the complexities of English/French inter-relations: subtle account of the relations between England and one of its important allies, enemies, neighbours.
  • Calin, William W. The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Animated accounts of continental French literary tradition in England, including John Gower’s French writing.
  • _______. 2014. The Lily and the Thistle: The French Tradition and the Literature of Scotland. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. Briefly deals with French texts composed in Scotland and studies the interactions of Scottish writers with European French traditions.
  • Campbell, Emma and Robert Mills, Re-thinking Translation: Ethics, Politics, Theory. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012. Valuable account of the current state of translation studies, with many Anglo-Norman and French studies.
  • Carruthers, M., ed. Language in Medieval Britain. Networks and Exchanges, Proceedings of the 2013 Harlaxton Symposium. Donnington: 2014. Valuable studies of particular domains, networks, registers.
  • Clanchy, M.T. From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307, 3rd edn (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). An extremely important book that thinks trilingually, ahead of its time from its first edition: very illuminating about medieval multilingual documentary and textual production, its producers, consumers, and the nature, implications and consequences of literacy.
  • Crane, Susan. “Anglo-Norman Cultures.” The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature. Ed. David Wallace, 35-60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Excellent single chapter account of Anglo-Norman literature and its contexts.
  • Durkin, P. Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English. Oxford: 2013. Philip Durkin of the Oxford English Dictionary has worked closely with the Anglo-Norman Dictionary: this is an important new account for both English and French.
  • Fenster, Thelma and Carolyn P. Collette, The French of Medieval England. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017. Wide-ranging collection, dealing with literature, language, translation, medieval French migration in later medieval England, the politics of Anglo-Norman and French and the history of Anglo-Norman studies.
  • Gaunt, Simon, “French Literature Abroad: Towards an Alternative History of French Literature,” Interfaces 1 (2015): online journal: http://riviste.unimi.it/interfaces/article/view/4938.
  • Gilbert, Jane, Simon Gaunt and William Burgwinkle, Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020. Pioneering study in the newly ‘global’ approach to French outside France, drawing on Derrida and actor-network theory. An important example of post-national ways of approaching literary study.
  • Kowaleski, Maryanne, ‘The French of England: A Maritime lingua franca?’ in Wogan-Browne, et al Language and Culture in Medieval Britain, pp. 103-117. Important and much cited article on French as the language of maritime law, merchants and others, with some literary examples.
  • Kuskowski, Ada, ‘Lingua franca legalis? A French vernacular legal culture from England to the Levant’, Reading Medieval Studies 40 (2014), Special Issue: Law’s Dominion in the Middle Ages: Essays for Paul Hyams, pp. 140-58. An interesting account of law and another important reminder that for much of its history, it is French, not English, that enables England to participate in global communities beyond its own archipelago.
  • Lewis, C.P. “The French in England before the Norman Conquest.” ANS 17 (1994): 123-39. Discusses francophone settlers in England before the coalition led by the Normans.
  • Lusignan, Serge. La langue des rois au Moyen Age. Paris: 2004. Everything by Lusignan is fascinating and important and affects how we think about language(s) in England and Europe. This pioneering study documents and analyses French as the language of the English and French courts up to –in England- at least Henry IV.
  • —. Parler vulgairement: Les intellectuels et la langue français aux XIIIe et XIVe siècle, 2nd edn. Paris: 1986, 1987. Medieval thinkers on French and its interrelations with Latin.
  • —. “La naissance d’une littérature en franceis en Angleterre au XII siècle.” In L’introuvable unité du français: contacts et variations linguistiques en Europe et en Amérique (XIIe-XVIIIe siècle), 16-27. Ed. S. Lusignan, F. Martineau, Y. C. Morin and P. Cohen. Laval: 2011. Yes, England’s where the French got the idea of written literature not in the vernacular, where written Old English was a well established language of elite textual production in many genres: on the French side of the Channel, Latin was the written, French the spoken language.
  • —. Essai d’histoire sociolinguistique: le français picard au Moyen Age. Paris: 2012a. Important study of one of England’s most crucial external political, mercantile and cultural areas of concern and exchange and a very important area of France for textual production.
  • —. “Á chacun son français : la communication entre l’Angleterre et les régions picardes et flamandes (xiiie et xive siècle).” IIème journée d’études anglo-normandes: approches techniques, littéraires et historiques, ed. A. Crépin and A. Leclant, 117-133. Paris: 2012b.
  • Morreale, Laura and Nicholas Paul, eds., The French of Outremer: Communities and Communication in the Crusading Mediterranean. Fordham University Press, 2018. Selected proceedings of the Fordham conference on the French of Outremer in 2014: pioneering collection opening up of study of French in the Mediterranean/Arabic world as used by the English crown, traders and crusaders.
  • O’Brien, Bruce R., Reversing Babel: Translation among the English during an Age of Conquests, c. 800-c. 1200 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011). Delineates a culture of translation among the bi and trilingualism of early England.
  • Ormrod, W. M. ‘The Use of English: Language, Law, and Political Culture in Fourteenth Century England.” Speculum (2003) 78: 750-87. Important article dismantling the myth of English as a ‘state’ language under Henry V and showing the importance of considering languages of record and performance over a wide range of text types in late medieval England.
  • Rothwell, W. ‘Sugar and Spice and All Things Nice: From Oriental Bazaar to English Cloister in Anglo-French’, Modern Language Review 94.3 (1999): 647-59. For this and other important articles by this former lexicographer and editor of the Anglo-Norman Dictionary, see http://www.anglo-norman.net/articlesA/ at the Anglo-Norman online hub housing the Anglo-Norman Dictionary.
  • Salter, Elizabeth. English and International: Studies in the literature, art and patronage of medieval England. Ed. Derek Pearsall and Nicolette Zeeman. Cambridge: 1988, repr 2010. A classic of transregional, interdisciplinary and multilingual thinking about literature in England.
  • Short, Ian. “Patrons and Polyglots: French literature in 12th-century England.” Anglo-Norman Studies 14 (1992), 229-49. Foundational: patrons are arguably more important than authors in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and polylingualism is the condition of literary culture, as indeed it is in later medieval England.
  • —. “Literary Culture at the Court of Henry II.” In Henry II: New Interpretations, eds. C. Harper-Bill & N. Vincent, 335-361. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007. Succinct account by a master philological, palaeographical, textual scholar and literary thinker. A further selection of important articles by Short follows:
  • —. “Anglice loqui nesciunt: monoglots in Anglo-Norman England.” Cultura Neolatina 69 (2009): 245-62.
  • —. “On Bilingualism in Anglo-Norman England.” Romance Philology 33 (1979-80), 467-79.
  • —. “L’Avènement du texte vernaculaire: la mise en recueil.” In Théories et pratiques de l’écriture au moyen âge, eds. E Baumgartner & C Marchello-Nizia, 11-24. Littérales, 4 Paris: Université de Paris X Nanterre, 1988.
  • —. “Tam Angli quam Franci: self-definition in Anglo-Norman England.” Anglo-Norman Studies 18 (1996), 153-75.
  • —. “Denis Piramus and the truth of Marie’s Lais.” Cultura Neolatina 67 (2007), 319-40.
  • —. “L’Anglo-normand au siècle de Chaucer: un regain de statistiques.” In Le Plurilinguisme au Moyen Age: Orient – Occident, éd. Claire Kappler & Suzanne Thiolier-Méjean, 67-77. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009.
  • —. “Verbatim et literatim: oral and written French in 12th-century Britain,” Vox Romanica 68 (2009), 156-68.
  • —. “Anglice loqui nesciunt: monoglots in Anglo-Norman England.” Cultura Neolatina 69 (2009), 245-62.
  • —. ‘Another Look at “le faus franceis.”’ Nottingham Medieval Studies 54 (2010), 35-55.
  • Townend, Matthew, Elizabeth Tyler and Thomas O’Donnell. ‘The Long Eleventh Century.” In The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature, ed. Clare Lees. Cambridge University Press, 2012. Important chapter on the polyglot culture of early England, and why England is where we first get a French written literary culture.
  • David Trotter (editor of the Anglo-Norman Dictionary) is a powerful and engaging thinker about French in England and elsewhere: his work is also needed to understand English and the linguistic-social-cultural-political histories in which it participates. A selection of articles:
  • _______, “Language Contact and Lexicography: The Case of Anglo-Norman.” The Origins and Development of Emigrant Languages: Proceedings from the Second Rasmus Rask Colloquium, Odense University, November 1994. Ed. Hans R.Nielsen and Lene Schøsler, Odense: Odense University Press, 1996. 21-39. Trenchant account of the status of Anglo-Norman, discussion of appropriate paradigms for Anglo-Norman and for relating it to other languages in Britain and elsewhere.
  • _______. 2003a. ‘Not as eccentric as it looks: Anglo-French and French French’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 39 (2003), 427-438.
  • ______. 2003b ‘L’anglo-normand: variété insulaire, ou variété isolée?’, Médiévales, 45: 43-54.
  • ______. 2008. ‘L’anglo-normand en France: les traces documentaires’, Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 152 (2008), 893-905.
  • _______. 2010. ‘Language Labels, Language Change and Lexis’, in Medieval Multilingualism: The Francophone World and its Neighbours, ed. Keith Busby and Christoph Kleinhanz (Turnhout, Brepols), pp. 43-61.
  • ______. 2011a. ‘(Socio)linguistic Realities of Cross-Channel Communication in the Thirteenth Century’, Thirteenth Century England 13:117-131. Disposes of the idea that French in England became ‘cut off’ from Europe when King John lost Normandy in 1204.
  • _______. 2013. ‘Deinz certeins boundes: Where Does Anglo-Norman Begin and End?’ Romance Philology 67: 139-77.
  • Tyler, Elizabeth, England in Europe: English Royal Women and Literary Patronage, c. 1000-c.1150. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2017. An important book that establishes the cosmopolitan nature of English culture before the Norman Conquest, places England in eleventh-century Europe’s wide-ranging networks, and shows the key role of women’s patronage, as it moves from Latin to French, in the development of French literature as an idea exported from England outwards rather than brought into England from Normandy (a relative cultural backwater at the time).
  • Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn, ‘Recovery and Loss: Women’s Writing Around Marie de France’, with an Appendix by Ian Short, in Women Intellectuals and Leaders in the Middle Ages, ed. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis and John van Engen. Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. 169-189.
  • Wogan-Browne, J., et al, ed. Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England, c. 1100-c. 1500. York: York Medieval Press with Boydell and Brewer, 2009. Introduction gives an account of the current state of the field, the necessity of its integration in English literary history, and some indications of the effects of that integration. Essays range across genres and periods in medieval England to show the differences French makes.

THE FRENCH OF JEWS IN ENGLAND

Jews in the Middle Ages, faced with restrictions on land-holding and drawn to urban occupations, contributed their acquired financial expertise to the well-being of a number of European sovereigns, to religious leaders and their houses, to aristocrats, and to people of lesser stations. Encouraged to migrate from Normandy to England by William the Conqueror, they, like William and his other followers, spoke and often wrote French. A mix of impulses—among them, Christian expansionism, popular resentment of the royal protections Jews enjoyed, and the excessive taxation that left them unable to continue their financial activities—led to the 1290 expulsion from England of all Jewish communities. In spite of the destruction of most Jewish records, however, there is new work on the Jews’ use of French. With recent increasing scholarly attention to medieval Jewish lives, scholars have been able to retrieve traces of interactive Hebrew-Latin scholarship for which French was frequently an intermediary (Olszowy-Schlanger), and at least one researcher has asked whether there could have been a Jewish dialect of French in England (Trotter). From extant records, researchers have lately begun to theorize constructing a picture of Jewish women’s lives (Boyarin, 2020).

  • Boyarin, Adrienne Williams, “Medieval Anglo-Jewish Women at Court.” In Women Leaders and Intellectuals in the Middle Ages, ed. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis and John van Engen. Cambridge: Brewer, 2020. Pp. 55-69. Includes letters from Jewish women in French and Latin.
  • Krummel, Miriamne Ara, and Tison Pugh, ed. Jews in Medieval England: Teaching Representations of the Other. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Articles by S.O. Ambrose, M. L. Price, K.M. Kletter, J.C. Witt, H. Blurton and H. Johnson, E. Houlik-Ritchey, A. Thomas, W.A, Quinn, K. Lavezzo, E. A. G. Binnie, S.B. Caroselli, B. Stevenson, D.L. Despres, L. Lampert-Weissig, G. Ford, M.A. Krummel, C. Newman Goldy, A. W. Boyarin. Appendices.
  • Olszowy-Schlanger, Judith, “A School of Christian Hebraists in Thirteenth-Century England: A Unique Hebrew-Latin-French and English Dictionary,” European Journal of Jewish Studies 12 (2007): 249-77.
  • Skinner, Patricia, ed. The Jews in Medieval Britain: Historical, Literary, and Archaeological Perspectives. Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2003. Essays on 12th c. colonization; on Jews under Henry I and Henry III; Jews in government records; church and Jews; archaeological evidence; Jewish women; fictions of Judaism; the medieval York Jewry.
  • Trotter, D. A. “Peut-on parler de judéo-anglo-normand? Textes anglo-normands en écriture hébraïque,” Médiévales 68 (2015): 25-34.
  • On Christian attitudes to Jews and Judaism in England, see:
  • Boulton, Maureen B. M., trans. Piety and Persecution in the French Texts of England, FRETS 6 (Tempe, AZ: MRTS, 2013). English translations of the Childhood of Jesus Christ, Little St. Hugh of Lincoln, among others.
  • Boyarin, Adrienne Williams. Miracles of the Virgin in Medieval England: Law and Jewishness in Marian Legends. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010. With the thirteenth-century codification of English law, Mary, at once a “mediatrix” and a “legislatrix,” frequently becomes a figure with special dominion over the Jews.
  • Boyarin, Adrienne Williams. The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess: The Polemics of Sameness in Medieval English Anti-Judaism (Philadelphia: UPenn Press, 2020).
  • Despres, Denise L. “Immaculate Flesh and the Social Body: Mary and the Jews.” Jewish History, 12.1 (1998), 47-69.
  • “Les Enfaunces de Jesu Crist: Second Epilogue.” In Vernacular Literary Theory from the French of England: Texts and Translations, c. 1120-c. 1450. Eds. and trans. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Thelma Fenster, and Delbert Russell. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2016, pp. 178-84.
  • Fenster, Thelma. “English Women and their French Books: Teaching about the Jews in Medieval England.” In The French of Medieval England, ed. Thelma Fenster and Carolyn P. Collette (Cambridge; D. S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 175-89. Examination of manuscript texts read or owned by Christian women reveals their role in teaching antisemitism.
  • “Guillaume le Clerc de Normandie, Le Bestiaire divin: Prologue and Extracts.” In Vernacular Literary Theory from the French of England, pp. 156-60. Bestiaire shows a preoccupation with interpretation that revolves around a model of Jewish reading as benightedly literal.
  • James, M.R. “Rare Mediaeval Tiles and Their Story.” The Burlington Magazine 42 (1923): 32-37. A series of medieval tiles linked to the Infancy stories, possibly from the walls of an English church or schoolroom. Most can be seen today at the British Museum, while a few are to be found in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
  • Nisse, Ruth. Jacob’s Shipwreck: Diaspora, Translation, and Jewish-Christian Relations in Medieval England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017. Studies how Jewish and Christian writers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries rewrote ancient texts: among others, medieval Latin and Hebrew reworkings of Josephus’ Jewish War, the Anglo-French Play of Adam, and the Latin “Romance” of the patriarch Joseph’s Egyptian wife, Aseneth.
  • “Poème sur l’Ancien Testament (Poem on the Old Testament), Prologue.” In Vernacular Literary Theory from the French of England, pp. 383-89.
  • Rose, E. M. The Murder of William of Norwich: The Origins of the Blood Libel in Medieval Europe. Oxford UP, 2015. Examines the ritual murder accusation.
  • Rubin, Miri. The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews. New Haven: Yale, 1999. (On the role of “story” in creating and furthering animosity toward Jews.)
  • “Sermons on Joshua. Extracts from Sermons 4 and 5.” In Vernacular Literary Theory from the French of England, pp. 222-31. Vernacular writer adds “consistent criticism of Judaism.”

SOME ART-HISTORICAL OF IMPORTANCE FOR FRENCH IN ENGLAND

Art historians have read everything on the manuscript page for a long time (whether it is French text or Latin or English), in order to consider the interactions of visual, material and textual culture in the medieval book. All the works cited below are important contributions to literary history and its materializations, as well as to art history, and all are fascinating reading and viewing.

  • Kumler, Aden. Translating Truth: Ambitious Images and Religious Knowledge in Late Medieval France and England. New Haven: 2011.
  • Sandler, L. F. The Psalter of Robert de Lisle in the British Library. London: 1983, repr 1999.
  • —. Gothic Manuscripts, 1285-1385, 2 vols. A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles 5. London: 1986.
  • —. Illuminators and Patrons in Fourteenth-Century England: The Psalter and Hours of Humphrey de Bohun and the Manuscripts of the Bohum Family. London: 2014.
  • Smith, Kathryn A. Art, Identity and Devotion in Fourteenth-Century England: Three Women Patrons and their Books of Hours. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003.
  • —. The Taymouth Hours. London: British Library, 2011.

PALEOGRAPHY AND BOOK HISTORY

  • Avril, François and Patricia Danz Stirneman. Manuscrits enluminés d’origine insulaire, VIIe-XXe siècle. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale (France), Département des manuscrits, 1987. Classic descriptions and a valuable source for the variety of English francophone illuminated manuscripts across the medieval period.
  • Careri, M., C. Ruby and I. Short, with T. Nixon and P. Stirnemann. Livres et écritures en français et en occitan au XIIe siècle: Catalogue illustré. Rome: 2011. Shows that 66% of the manuscripts containing French in the C12th were produced in England, and catalogues and illustrates 94 manuscripts plus 19 possible examples.
  • Careri, Maria, Françoise Fery-Hue, Françoise Gasparri, Geneviève Hasenohr, Gillette Labory, Sylvie Lefèvre, Anne-Françoise Leurquin, Christine Ruby. Album de manuscrits français du XIIIe siècle Mise en page et mise en texte. Roma: Viella, 2001. Mainly continental, but valuable: and shows how useful a comparable volume for C13th francophone manuscripts in England would be.
  • Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn, Maidie Hilmo and Linda Olson. Opening up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012. Thoughtful approaches for beginners and scholars alike and gives attention to French in English manuscripts.
  • Roberts, Jane, Guide to Scripts used in English Writings up to 1500 (the British Library, 2005). Transcriptions and helpfully detailed analyses of the manuscript text excerpts it images, and a useful context for manuscripts in England. It includes some Latin examples and one example with French text wrapped around the Peterborough Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, no. 23.
  • For the interrelations of Old English and French in C11th-13th England, see Elaine Treharne with Orietta Da Rold, Mary Swan, and Takako Kato, The Production and Use of English Manuscripts 1060 to 1220 (http://www.le.ac.uk/ee/em1060to1220/). Useful descriptions of bi and trilingual MSS in the period, and for the French glosses and other addenda to manuscripts of Old English and Anglo-Latin.

OTHER WORKS: MULTILINGUALISM/LANGUAGE/SOCIO-LINGUISTICS

  • The pioneering volume that crystallized perception of multilingualism as a field is David Trotter’s collection, Multilingualism in later Medieval Britain (Woodbridge, 2000).
  • A good collection on earlier multilingualism is Elizabeth Tyler’s Conceptualizing Multilingualism in England, c. 800 -c. 1250 (Turnhout, 2011).
  • Three classic studies are to be found in the short but cogent essays by Stein (“Multilingualism”), Baswell (“Multilingualism on the Page”), and Warren (“Translation”) in Paul Strohm, ed. Middle English: Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature (2007). 
  • Jefferson Judith and Ad Putter, eds., Multilingualism in Medieval Britain (c. 1066-1520): Sources and Analysis. Turnhout, 2013. Another valuable collection across the English Middle Ages.
  • For a valuable short modern introduction to multilingualism (the default linguistic condition of the majority of humans on the planet), see John C. Maher, Multilingualism: A Very Short Introduction. Very Short Introductions Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
  • Clark, Cecily. “Women’s Names in Post-Conquest England: Observations and Speculations.” Speculum 53 (1978): 223-51. Foundational for the socio-linguistic effects of inter-marriage.
  • Crane, Susan. “Social Aspects of Bilingualism in the Thirteenth Century.” Thirteenth Century England 6 (1997): 103-116. Lucid and valuable study of the complexities of written and spoken language in the C13th.
  • Frankis, John. “The Social Context of Vernacular Writing in Thirteenth Century England: The Evidence of the Manuscripts.” Thirteenth-Century England 1 (1986): 175-184.
  • Hinton, Thomas, ‘Anglo-French in the Thirteenth Century: A Reappraisal of Walter de Bibbesworth’s Tretiz’, Modern Language Review 112.4 (2017): 855-881. Important new study of the earliest manual for teaching French, commissioned by Lady Dionisia Munchensi for teaching her children, of thirteenth-century French in England.
  • Ingham, Richard, ed. The Anglo-Norman Language and its Contexts (York: York Medieval Press with Boydell and Brewer, 2010). Richard Ingham is a leading scholar of later Anglo-Norman and is radically altering our picture of French in late medieval England in particular: a selection of his work follows.
  • _______,. 2009. ‘Mixing Languages on the Manor’, Medium Aevum 78.1: 80-97. Fascinating study of the trilingualism of estate management across the classes.
  • _______. ed., 2010. The Anglo-Norman Language in its Contexts (York: York Medieval Press). Valuable collection.
  • _______. 2012. The Transmission of Anglo-Norman: Language History and Language Acquisition (Amsterdam). Important new argument for the history and nature of Anglo-Norman.
  • _______. (2015b) ‘The Maintenance of French in Later Medieval England’. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 115/4: 623-645. Earlier assumptions about the decay and death of Anglo-Norman shown to be inaccurate.
  • Kibbee, Douglas A. For to Speke French Trewely: The French Language in England 1000-1600: Description and Instruction. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1991. Some of the linguistic perspectives here are now outdated, but the book is still of considerable interest as a history of the teaching of French in medieval England, and there is a valuable Appendix with entries and examples from the writers of medieval handbooks for teaching and learning French.
  • Porter, David W. “The Earliest Texts with English and French.” Anglo-Saxon England (1999): 87-110.
  • Romaine, Suzanne. Bilingualism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.
  • Schendl, H. and L. Wright. “Introduction and ‘Code-switching in Early English: Historical Background and Methodological and Theoretical Issues.” In Schendl and Wright, eds. Code-switching in Early English, 1-14, 15-45. Berlin: 2011. This is a very useful introduction and overview to the fascinating area of English-French-Latin study whose very terms are the subject of hot debate (doesn’t the very idea of code-switching re-install boundaries between languages?), but which has the power to sensitize everyone to the mixed character of English.

For further literary and cultural sources, see the Literature section under Teaching.