Jocelyn Wogan-Browne on Cultural Politics and Social History, c. 1100-c. 1500
Thursdays at 5pm, Weeks 1-6 Hilary, Examination Schools
French played a major, though not the only role, in the pervasive multilingualism of British history and culture. As Britain’s only medieval ‘global’ vernacular, it was also important to a wide range of people for their participation in external theatres of empire, trade, culture, conflict, and crusade. Displacing the long shadow of nineteenth-century nationalizing conceptions of language and their entrenchment in modern university disciplinary divisions, emerging histories of French in England and increasingly of French in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland offer new ways of understanding language and identity. These lectures trace francophone medieval Britain in a chronological sequence across its four main centuries, interpolating two thematic lectures on areas especially needing integration into our histories, medieval women and French in Britain, and French Bible translation in medieval England.
About the Lecture Series: The Ford Lectures in British History were founded by a bequest from James Ford, and inaugurated by S.R.Gardiner in 1896-7. Since then, an annual series has been delivered over six weeks in Hilary term. They have long been established as the most prestigious series in Oxford and an important annual event in the University’s calendar.
About the speaker: Professor Jocelyn Wogan-Browne is Professor emerita of both York University (where she held the Chair of Mediaeval Literature from 2005-2010) and Fordham University in New York (where she was the Thomas F.X. and Theresa Mullarkey Chair in Literature from 2010-2019).
Her scholarship has involved the reconceptualization of English medieval literary culture as multilingual. She has created a fundamentally new understanding of the importance attached to knowing, speaking, reading and/or writing French in later medieval England. This has been a major, field-changing contribution, and much work on the culture of late medieval England is now unthinkable without taking her insights into account. Wogan-Browne’s Vernacular Literary Theory from the French of Medieval England: Texts and Translation (with Thelma Fenster and Delbert Russell) (Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2016) spearheaded her approach, building on her earlier The Idea of the Vernacular: Middle English Literary Theory c. 1280-1520, with Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans. A book of collected works, The French of Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, published in 2017, speaks to the wide-ranging influence of her work, and the esteem with which she is held by the community.
Jocelyn came to Oxford to study for the B.Phil. in Medieval Literature and Language at St Hilda’s College with Prof. Elspeth Kennedy, one of Oxford’s most distinguished medievalist. The medievalist Bruce Mitchell, a fellow Australian, became her mentor and made sure to include her in the welcome parties he put on for international students from the Southern Hemisphere in his rooms at St Edmund Hall. Jocelyn then started an Oxford DPhil in Old Norse and Old French, but was offered a lectureship at Liverpool for Early Middle English and Anglo-Norman, receiving a doctorate on the strength of her numerous publication. Her early research in Early Middle English involved work with manuscripts in the Bodleian and her research in Anglo-Norman confirmed Oxford as her intellectual home, since it is a major hub of Anglo-Norman studies and resources. For many years, one of the best ways of working on under-researched Anglo-Norman texts was to read them in Bodleian manuscripts. Oxford has now been Jocelyn’s base in Europe for the last two decades, and she is well-known and connected to both with the medievalist and the linguist communities. She is a member of the St Edmund Hall SCR and has been a very positive source of inspiration, particularly encouraging early career fellows, helping with research proposals, giving careers advice, bringing in international visitors to Oxford and being generally a role model. She also co-directed one of the medieval mystery plays, working patiently and extensively with the students on their pronunciation (she won several teaching awards during her academic career).
Lecture Schedule
23rd Jan: “Alle mine thegenas … frencisce & englisce”: The Languages of 1066 – And All That
30th Jan: Langue des reines: The Importance of Women to French and French to Women.
6th Feb: Expansions: ‘Everyone knows that French is better understood and more widely used than Latin’: Matthew Paris (in French, 1253×59)
13th Feb: ‘That each may in his own tongue … know his God’ (Grosseteste, in French, 1230s): Bible Translation in Medieval England
20th Feb: “Lette Frenchmen in their Frenche endyten”(Thomas Usk, c.1384-87): French in the Multilingual Fourteenth Century
27th Feb: “Et lors que parlerez anglois /Que vous n’oubliez pas le François” (manuscript dedication, c. 1445) : Off-shoring French?
More information can be found here: https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/james-ford-lectures-british-history
