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  • The French of Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Jocelyn Wogan-Browne ed. by Thelma Fenster and Carolyn P. Collette
  • E. Amanda McVitty
Fenster, Thelma, and Carolyn P. Collette, eds, The French of Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2017; hardback; pp. 360; 6 b/w, 1 line illustrations; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 9781843844594.

This book is a Festschrift for Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, whose prolific scholarship on the French written, read, and spoken in medieval England has fostered much-needed interdisciplinary research into Britain’s plurilingual past. Its publication is a welcome intellectual and political intervention at a moment when Brexit has seen fervent claims advanced about England’s essential difference from Europe, and created a climate in which speaking English has become problematically entangled with the idea of being ‘English’. Felicity Riddy’s ‘Foreword’ notes that [End Page 208] as an Australian, Wogan-Browne ‘sees England with an outsider’s clarity: part of a small island that is closer to France than Tasmania is to mainland Australia; always mongrel and multicultural but caught up in a monoglot version of its own past’ (p. xiv). Approaching the French of England from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, the contributors complicate and destabilize simplistic narratives about language and identity by providing rich explorations of Francophony and multilingualism across a breadth of literary, social, political, and commercial contexts and practices.

Despite the diversity of subject matter, literary and archival sources, and methods represented—from close reading of a single literary text to data-driven analysis of government records spanning years—the volume is given a pleasing coherence through its underlying connections to the major thematic strands of Wogan-Browne’s work. Most of the contributions focus on texts and contexts c. 1100 to c. 1500, with chapters by Paul Cohen and Delbert Russell considering afterlives of the French of medieval England in early modern and nineteenth-century scholarship. Thomas O’Donnell, Emma Campbell, and Monika Otter engage with practices of translation, glossing, and translational ethics. Working across French, Latin, and English in scientific, literary, and musical manuscripts, the authors challenge the construction of linguistic hierarchies by emphasizing the co-presence of languages and their flexible uses in multilingual communities. Chapters by Fiona Somerset, Serge Lusignan, and Richard Ingham examine the cultural and political weight carried by French vocabularies and registers deployed within, respectively, political complaint poems; cross-border communications from the Anglo-Scottish Wars of 1295–1314; and the Early South English Legendary. Theoretically sophisticated studies by Christopher Baswell and Thelma Fenster extend upon Wogan-Browne’s pioneering work on women’s textual communities. Fenster offers a fascinating, if disturbing, account of the dissemination of anti-Jewish myths and stereotypes through French texts commissioned by aristocratic English laywomen and intended for the instruction of children. Baswell deftly integrates considerations of space, gender, and disability networks to develop a stimulating and original reading of the Lives of three women saints in the Campsey manuscript.

Andrew Taylor, Nicholas Watson, and R. F. Yeager address questions of audience and illuminate intricate interactions between French and English languages in medieval literary texts, whether a chanson de geste that turns out to be ‘a Plantagenet celebration of Charlemagne’ (p. 100); the canonical Piers Plowman; or John Gower’s under-studied French poems. Turning from manuscript cultures to social contexts, W. Mark Ormrod and Maryanne Kowaleski draw on the considerable data of the ‘England’s Immigrants, 1350–1550’ project to investigate language acquisition and use amongst French-speaking immigrants to England at either end of the Hundred Years’ War. These chapters present invaluable empirical evidence for ‘daily linguistic encounters’ (p. 194) and for how people understood and experienced national and regional identities. Robert M. Stein’s posthumous [End Page 209] contribution, in the form of a short but dense conference paper, contemplates the ways territory and sovereignty were imagined in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman chronicles and poetry, with ‘important consequences for the whole course of the historiography of state formation or nation building’ (p. 273). Finally, Robert W. Hanning’s ‘Afterword’ brings the book to a satisfying conclusion, drawing together its diverse threads to highlight broader...

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