The French of Medieval England ─ Essays in Honour of Jocelyn Wogan-Browne

Recent research has emphasised the importance of insular French in medieval English culture alongside English and Latin; for a period of some four hundred years, French (variously labelled the French of England, Anglo-Norman, Anglo-French, and Insular French) rivalled these two languages. However, little scholarship has been devoted to the mechanics of living in and between languages, where the complications of multilingualism made translation, negotiation and adaptation essential, where John Gower wrote in Latin whilst his contemporary Geoffrey Chaucer broke new ground writing in English. The essays here, a tribute to the pioneering scholar in this field, look at the practices, processes and cultural effects of translation within medieval England. They study linguistic exchange and cultural adaptation from a variety of perspectives and as manifested in a variety of witnesses - historical documents, literature, music, and religious texts. They also look at the forces and influences that worked in England in France, in later periods, to construe language as essentially rooted in geography and geopolitics rather than in human culture. Contributors: Christopher Baswell, Paul Cohen, Carolyn Collette, Thelma Fenster, Robert Hanning, Richard Ingham, Maryanne Kowaleski, Delbert Russell, Serge Lusignan, Thomas O'Donnell, W. Mark Ormrod, Monika Otter, Fiona Somerset, Robert M. Stein, Andrew Taylor, Nicholas Watson, Robert F. Yeager