Language made visible: The invention of French in England after the Norman Conquest [PhD thesis]

407 Pages·2008·1.68 MB·

by  David Georgi

Language Made Visible:
The Invention of French in England after the Norman Conquest

by

David Georgi

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of Comparative Literature
New York University
January, 2008

______________________________
Nancy Freeman Regalado
3307998

Copyright 2008 by
Georgi, David

All rights reserved
3307998
2008
© David Georgi
All Rights Reserved, 2008
“A fundamental question is whether the Norman Conquest helped develop
French as a written language.”

– Michael Clanchy From Memory to Written Record:
England 1066-1307, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 215

Socrates: But let me next ask you this. What power do names have for us?
What’s the good of them?

– Plato, Cratylus
DEDICATION

To the memory of Sean Michael Collins
(1965-2002)
who did tell us, after all, that he would go first
when somebody had to put his head on the block.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For their early gift of inspiring a love for words and history, for their
endless generosity, and for their unfaltering presence as wise companions in my
life, my first thanks are to my parents, Roger and Angela Georgi. My sisters, Mara
and Karen, read long swaths of draft pages with their keen teachers’ eyes, and
offered advice as welcome and sustaining as their perennial encouragement. My
uncle, Michael Puglisi, allowed me displace him from the house in Vermont for
more seasons than I like to admit, and that quiet space was a great help. In the
matter of good working conditions, I also thank Lois Winnifred Georgi and
Maruzza Accetta, though they are not with us in any easily explicable sense.
Richard Sieburth first opened my eyes to the complexities and implications
of translation, and over the years has offered sage counsel on a truly broad sweep of
topics. If a dissertation were allowed to have a tutelary spirit or patron saint, this
one’s is without doubt Nancy Freeman Regalado. When I came to her with this
project, which was in a number of respects quite outside her usual sphere of
expertise, she was willing to take it in, and she nurtured it from start to finish with
inexhaustible patience and encouragement. Generous mentor and expert navigator,
she permitted me an extraordinary degree of freedom, allowing the project to find
its own direction; I mean it more than most when I say that the flaws and
shortcomings of this dissertation are strictly my own.
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Finally, last only because she arrived latest on the scene, Karmenlara
Seidman breezed in from whatever enchanted land she is from, bringing insights
and wisdom which made finishing this dissertation a harvest with bounties far
greater and far different from the expected lessons in research, scholarship, and
perseverance.

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ABSTRACT

French literature, we now know, began in England not in France. The
transformation of Old French from an oral vernacular to a language of written
literature was perhaps the most momentous result of the collision of languages and
cultures in England after the Norman Conquest. This paper seeks to add to our
understanding of the event by tracing and analyzing changes in the way the
Normans talked about, and conceived of, their vernacular tongue. At the same
time, this medieval case study exposes crucial differences between medieval and
modern ideas about the triangular relationship of language, nation, and state.
The men who stepped off their boats in 1066 were Normans who spoke
romanz; two generations later, when Norman men and women in England became
the pioneers of Romance vernacular literature, it was as franceis who called their
language franceis. The language itself had not changed appreciably, but their
metalinguistic construct had. Back on the Continent romanz had been understood
as a sprawling not-quite-Latin, spoken everywhere and associated with no
particular group. The Anglo-Normans conceived of franceis as a distinct language,
proper to their natio.
Two methodological premises animate this study: dedication to explaining
metalinguistic changes on the basis of textual evidence rather than vague notions
such as ‘changing perspective’ or ‘English influence’; and recognition that
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medieval discourse on language and identity – even terms whose meanings we
presume to be obvious, such as romanz, franceis and France – must be translated
astutely across time if we are to avoid imposing anachronistic assumptions. A
comparative approach, examining Old English evidence alongside Latin and
French, reveals that the Normans’ shift in the way they defined themselves and
their language involved directly translating English concepts and English words.
The French language – not just the writing of it, but the very awareness of it as a
language – was formed by contact and conflict, not in any center or capitol but out
on the border, where confrontation with the Other leads to self-definition and
invention.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication iv
Acknowledgements v
Abstract vii
List of Abbreviated References xii
Prologue 1
Introduction 3
1. Normans Identity and the Conquest of England 28

(cid:1) Norman identity before 1066 36
(cid:1) Norman identity after the Conquest: problems and positions 50
(cid:1) Reassessing the evidence 59

2. Writing a New Identity: Anglo-Norman Historiographical Texts
after 1066 80

(cid:1) Franci in post-Conquest Anglo-Norman history writing 83
(cid:1) Franceis in the Anglo-Normans’ vernacular history writing 115
(cid:1) Conclusions from historiographical texts, c. 800-1135 124
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