French in Medieval Britain: Cultural Politics and Social History, c. 1100-c. 1500
Professor Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Fordham University)
Thursdays at 5pm, Weeks 1-6 Hilary, Examination Schools
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 History Faculty calendar.
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.
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