Welcome to the project website for Learning Anglo-French, an ERC/UKRI-funded research project based at the University of Exeter. Learning Anglo-French (LAF) will operate over a five-year period (2023-28), and will offer the first sustained response to the question of how the French language was learned in Britain between the 13th and 16th centuries.
Recent work on the languages of medieval Britain has stressed the central role played by French in literary, cultural, administrative and documentary spheres during the later medieval period. The presence of French is particularly evident from the 13th century onwards, from precisely the point when so-called ‘naturalistic’ transmission of the language is assumed to have fizzled out. How, then, was French learned — and taught — across Britain in the later Middle Ages? Who was learning French, and what did these learners use to develop their grasp of the language? What strategies existed to help in the quest to, as one late-14th-century manual puts it, ‘apprendre a parlere, bien sonere, et parfitement escriere douce francés’ [‘learn to speak, pronounce well, and and correctly write sweet French?’]?
In answering these questions, the project team at Learning Anglo-French will draw on a variety of exciting methodologies. Traditional codicological analysis will help us to understand which ‘language-learning’ texts travelled together in which manuscripts, and how they may have formed a ‘curriculum’ for studying the language. Working within the digital humanities, we will build a database of manuscripts and their constituent texts, linked to a mapping tool that will allow viewers to explore their origin and provenance. Finally, the cutting-edge science of biocodicology will furnish exciting new insights into the physical makeup of these manuscripts, uncovering both where they were manufactured and (possibly) who went on to use them.
With the project in its early stages, this website currently aims to offer a brief introduction to the team and the work that we are doing. You are warmly invited to return to this site as the project evolves, and as we begin to share our findings.
Learning Anglo-French is funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), having been selected for receipt of a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council in 2022.
Header image, left to right: Walter de Bibbesworth, ‘Tretiz’ (Cambridge, Trinity College,, MS O.2.21, fol. 120v); numerals (Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.14.40, fol. 147r); verb conjugations (London, British Library, MS Sloane 513, fol. 137v). Images ©️Master and Fellows of Trinity College and the British Library Board.