Imagining and enacting education in the French texts of post-Conquest England

Abstract

Much work in recent years on the ‘French of England’ has sought to clarify and make more concrete the environments in which the French language was used in the centuries following the Norman Conquest. One neglected selion in this field of research, however, has been the specific case of didactic literature not written with the express purpose of providing spiritual instruction. The present study attempts to remedy this oversight, examining three distinctive varieties of didactic text — computus material, translations of the Disticha Catonis, and works of social ‘courtesy' — in order to present a more nuanced picture of how and why French was used, transmitted, and received outside of ostensibly literary or homiletic circles. The picture that emerges from this study is one of a wider audience for French didactic material than has previously been acknowledged, with the clergy in particular playing a key role in the reception of texts that have hitherto been identified primarily as household or ‘secular’ material. With many of the texts explored in this thesis only available in outdated editions, or indeed being previously unedited, the thesis also presents a range of material that has largely been overlooked in considerations of both Anglo-Norman’s reach and its conceptions of instruction, bringing them into dialogue with a corpus-linguistic study that attempts to identify the semantic scope of each element of the lexis of education in the ‘French of England’.