Medieval Francophone Literary Culture Outside France

Medievalists are well aware that French was used widely outside French-speaking areas of the kingdom of France throughout the high Middle Ages. Texts in French were widely disseminated and there were substantial indigenous francophone textual traditions outside the borders of France. However, the agendas set by 19th-c. nationalist literary historians have proved tenacious and if some areas of francophone literary culture outside France, principally Anglo-Norman, have been the subject of sustained research, the 'Frenchness' of texts written in French has in practice rarely been questioned. As a result, the nature and extent of the dissemination of French culture and francophone literary traditions outside France remains under-researched and imprecisely calibrated. Furthermore, texts transmitted in 'non-standard' forms of French have often been dismissed as flawed or bowdlerized, unworthy of attention.

This project proposes an investigation of medieval francophone literary culture that will be centred not on France but rather on two important axes of transmission of francophone textual culture: one that goes from England across Flanders, to Burgundy and beyond; another across the Alps to Northern Italy and then out into the Mediterranean and further afield to Cyprus and the Levant. Paris contributes to these axes, but does not necessarily stand at their centre. Rather than considering simply where texts come from and their earliest form, we will investigate where they go: when, in what form and why they travel. The provenance of manuscripts is rarely studied systematically (often simply not noted in catalogues or critical editions), so that in many instances a manuscript with texts in French is implicitly assumed to be 'French', without the value of the term being considered. Yet it is clear that a substantial proportion of surviving manuscripts for some widely disseminated medieval texts in French comes from outside France. The extent of the phenomenon is unknown, and this is precisely what we will endeavour to establish.

The project focuses upon 6 major francophone textual traditions from the 12th and 13th c. that have a pan-European dissemination in the 13th and 14th c., as well as strong legacies of translations/adaptations in other languages: the Roman d'Alexandre, the Roman de Troie, the Lancelot and Tristan en prose, the Roman de la Rose and Brunetto Latini's Trésor. Our aim is to map, insofar and as accurately as is possible, the dissemination of these texts by determining the provenance of surviving manuscripts, and their trajectory. Because traditional scholarship has been largely concerned with the establishment of authoritative 'originals' and generally been less interested in what becomes of texts as they are transmitted, this new research will reveal a considerable body of hitherto occluded data on the dissemination of francophone literary culture.

Our first aim is to provide solid empirical data on the dissemination of these texts through time and space. Using this empirical data, the project team will address a series of more speculative questions concerning the use of French as a marker of cultural identity outside France.

1) In what social and cultural milieus were francophone texts composed and disseminated outside France?
2) Is there a transnational francophone literary culture, and how does it vary?
3) Does the focus and form of medieval francophone literary texts change as they migrate?
4) Do sites of production and transmission outside France influence literary traditions in France?
5) Does literary French imply a cultural identity? If so, is this necessarily associated with France?
6) Should cultural identities be reconceived as mobile, produced by movement as much as by place?
7) What is the cultural freight of non-standard and hybrid forms of French?
8) How do non-standard forms influence our understanding of what French is? 9) Are there implications for literary history?

Who will benefit from this research? The most immediate impact will be on researchers in the field of medieval literature and postcolonial theory (outlined in detail in the Academic Beneficiaries section) but we do not intend this to be our only public. We are also committed to ensuring that the findings of the project reach an interested but non-academic public, including university-bound sixth-formers, school children at key stages 2-5, and adults curious about early British, French, Italian, Dutch and Mediterranean texts and travel.

How will these individuals benefit from this research? We intend to tap into the schools' curricula in teaching European history and medieval English Literature, particularly Chaucer, in order to exploit links between this curricular material and our own findings. Particular attention will be paid to the notion of national or cultural ownership of literary texts or the claim of cultural foundational status for literary texts and manuscripts based on the language in which they were composed or the libraries that have held them. A planned exhibit at Cambridge University Library will serve as a fulcrum from which to present our manuscripts themselves (or representative copies held within the Cambridge University and College libraries) and the conclusions we reach on medieval travel and its implications for notions of identity. We will display and explain the importance of these six (or perhaps more) manuscripts and offer hands-on training on how books were made in Middle Ages, both physically---through examining the materials from which manuscripts were made---and intellectually---how diverse texts were combined, laid out on parchment, and interrelated through rubrics and commentary. The University Library has responded positively to our proposal, providing us with practical suggestions on display and publishing and offering an estimate of costing. They have agreed in principle to co-sponsor such an interactive exhibition, open to the public, in the spring of 2014. We will publicize this exhibition vigorously in the schools and encourage teachers to bring their students for educational trips that will include specialist explanation of the material and hands-on workshops on creating facsimile manuscripts.

How will we ensure that they benefit? By a) conducting such age-appropriate demonstrations ourselves and training others to do so; b) engaging a manuscript specialist to assist us in developing these workshops for school groups and adult participants; c) present public lectures at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas (open to the public) and the Bloomsbury Festival on the theoretical and material aspects of the project: what we found, where we found it, and the implications that these findings have for remapping medieval literature as implicated in topics of travel, hybridity and exchange; d) present and sponsor student groups under the aegis of such established outreach activities as University Open Days, the Sutton Trust summer study days for disadvantage students and the Villiers Trust's week-long workshops on French studies for gifted and talented students, fifty percent of whom will also include students from disadvantaged backgrounds; e) exploit established links between Cambridge University, UCL and King's College London and schools with which they have formed admissions partnerships; f) sponsor a postgraduate workshop on the topic as a prelude to both of our international conferences; and g) present our findings on radio or television as part of a larger discussion of identity, national and ethnic, and the mutability of such categories; medieval travel and trade; and the question of whether language is necessarily a marker of cultural identity.