7 - Middle English Borrowing from French: Nouns and Verbs of Interpersonal Cognition in the Early South English Legendary

Summary

The nature and scope of language use in mediaeval England were for a long time framed by the ‘bounded perceptions’ that arise when compartmentalised academic disciplines shape complex realities into pedagogically manageable narratives. Framed through the disciplinary lens of English, the French of medieval England tends to be cast in the role of the protagonist to be ousted from the field, after having passed on some language traits to Middle English, the victor in the supposed linguistic contest. Seen in a French disciplinary frame, the French of England is no more than an eccentric offshoot which withered and died after a short-lived period of moderate literary interest that contributed to the francophone authorial canon only the reassuringly surnamed Marie ‘de France’.

In recent decades a number of researchers in the UK and elsewhere have established a research agenda that allows new perspectives to be taken. It has become possible to envisage the linguistic landscape of medieval England as one in which languages, and the literary production in them, co-existed and interacted so closely that to carve out boundaries around them now seems not just artificial but actually damaging to the character of the objects of study. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne's work stands out for encouraging the use of French as a medium for writing in England to be seen as an integral part of the literary and spiritual context of the time, and the present article pursues one such aspect of the converging perspectives that her research and that of others has made possible: the integration of French lexis with English in the context of religious writing. In particular, we explore what the language of religious writing for a popular audience can reveal about the diffusion of French vocabulary in English, at a point well before the so-called ‘Frenchified’ vocabulary of Gower and Chaucer makes itself felt at the end of the fourteenth century.

The status of French in medieval England has undergone substantial reassessment in this century. It has been shown by several authors that insular French survived as a viable multi-genre communicative medium well into the fourteenth century.