- Middle English
- List of Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Manuscript Matrix, Modern Canon
- Multilingualism
- Multilingualism on the Page
- Translation
- Aurality
- Books
- Temporalities
- Symbolic Economies
- Authority
- Institutions
- Form
- Episodes
- Beauty
- Imaginative Theory
- Feeling
- Conflict
- Genre Without System
- Liturgy
- Vision, Image, Text
- Saintly Exemplarity
- Speculative Genealogies
- Incarnational (Auto)Biography
- Drama as Textual Practice
- Vernacular Theology
- Heresy and Humanism
- Authorial Work
- Learning to Live
- Gossip and (un) Official Writing
- The Poetics of Practicality
- Index of Medieval Authors and Titles
- Index of Names
- Subject Index
Abstract and Keywords
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, England inherited a very complex and shifting linguistic situation. While English continued its slow and uneven ascent to political and literary prominence, French retained its important presence. Numerous manuscripts of Walter de Bibbesworth’s Tretiz de langage (also called Femina) appeared throughout the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries. Twenty copies of guides to French letter-writing, or collections of sample letters, were also produced during the same centuries. Such works illustrate the continuing practical uses of Anglo-French in the later Middle Ages in England. This article examines multilingualism on the page—occasions and usually specific written spaces where contextually unexpected languages suddenly, even dramatically, appear. It considers languages of authenticity, which shift considerably in varied settings from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, and the broad move from authenticating French to authenticating Latin.
Keywords: England, English, French, manuscripts, Anglo-French, Middle Ages, multilingualism, languages of authenticity, Latin
Christopher Baswell teaches medieval subjects at the University of California, Los Angeles. His interests include Arthurian literature, and he is the author of Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer.
Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.
Please subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.
For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.
- Middle English
- List of Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Manuscript Matrix, Modern Canon
- Multilingualism
- Multilingualism on the Page
- Translation
- Aurality
- Books
- Temporalities
- Symbolic Economies
- Authority
- Institutions
- Form
- Episodes
- Beauty
- Imaginative Theory
- Feeling
- Conflict
- Genre Without System
- Liturgy
- Vision, Image, Text
- Saintly Exemplarity
- Speculative Genealogies
- Incarnational (Auto)Biography
- Drama as Textual Practice
- Vernacular Theology
- Heresy and Humanism
- Authorial Work
- Learning to Live
- Gossip and (un) Official Writing
- The Poetics of Practicality
- Index of Medieval Authors and Titles
- Index of Names
- Subject Index