French Books in England
This project has two parts: first, a monograph, French in the English Bibliographic Imagination, 1380–1542.
What is the relationship between language and the material forms of words in books? This question motivates my monograph project, which argues for French’s material importance to developing ideas of the vernacular in England, 1380–1542. Because England produced and imported literature in many languages, understanding its textual culture necessitates disrupting any monolingual idea of English literature. Studying nearly 1,000 manuscripts and printed books containing French texts known to have been in England, I examine how French’s reception in books links language to materiality and produces bibliographic thinking. For instance, in imported manuscripts of French Arthurian romance, readers not only made explicit connections to English narratives, but also made notes on linguistic change over time.
Chapters on lexical glosses, marginal summaries, physical adaptations to books, and library collections show how users developed French as a linguistic, literary, and material category. This understanding, which reads French multilingually, embeds England in an international vernacular textual community stretching from Ireland to the Mediterranean. I employ language as a critical category of investigation that reveals new uses for and ideas of French as active and historical, local and international, distinct from and embedded within English multilingualism. These ideas, based in French’s material form, produce ways of imagining books in time and space. I argue that French’s unique role in England allowed English readers to develop ideas of transnational vernacular books with pasts, presents, and futures. French books, which disclose new aspects of England’s multilingual literary culture, redefine our conceptions of national identity, language, and material objects.
The second part of the project is a census of all French books known to have been in fifteenth-century England. The work of compiling and editing this database is ongoing.
