French Studies: Early Medieval Literature (original) (raw)
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Corpus des inscriptions de la France médiévale, 25
2014
Histoire Q uarante ans après le premier volume consacré à la ville de Poitiers sous la direction de Robert Favreau, le 25 e tome du Corpus des inscriptions de la France médiévale vient enrichir la série de trois départements de la région Centre : l'Indre, l'Indreet-Loire et le Loir-et-Cher. Avec 162 inscriptions datées du viii e au xiii e siècle, dont 81 pour le seul département de l'Indre-et-Loire du fait de la ville de Tours, cette région offre un patrimoine épigraphique particulièrement riche, abondant et varié.
The twenty essays brought together in this volume explore a wide range of perspectives relating to the materiality and textuality of medieval scripts and documents. The textuality and materiality of documents are an essential part of their communicative role. Medieval writing, as part of the interpersonal communication process, had to follow rules to ensure the legibility and understanding of a text and its connotations. This volume provides new insights into how different kinds of rules were designed, established, and followed in the shaping of medieval documents, as a means of enabling complex and subtle communicational phenomena. Because they provide a perspective for approaching the material they are supposed to organize, these rules (or the postulation of their use) provide powerful analytical tools for structural studies into given corpora of documents. Originating in talks given at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds between 2010 and 2012, the twenty papers in this collection offer a precise, in-depth analysis of a variety of medieval scripts, including books, charters, accounts, and epigraphic documents. In doing so, they integrate current developments in palaeography, diplomatics, and codicology in their traditional methodological set, as well as aspects of the digital humanities, and they bridge the gap between the so-called ‘auxiliary sciences of history’ and the field of communication studies. They illustrate different possibilities for exploring how the formal aspects of scripts took their place in the construction of effective communication structures. Table of Contents Preface Introduction–SÉBASTIEN BARRET, DOMINIQUE STUTZMANN, and GEORG VOGELER "Et hec scripsi manu mea propria": Known and Unknown Autographs of Charles IV as Testimonies of Intellectual Profile, Royal Literacy and Cultural Transfer—MARTIN BAUCH The ‘Empire of Letters’: Textualis and Cursiva in Pragmatic Manuscripts of Seville Cathedral, Thirteenth-Fifteenth Centuries—DIEGO BELMONTE FERNÁNDEZ Official Rules of Writing in the North of France? The Writing of Notarial Documents in Normandy between Practices and Regulations—ISABELLE BRETTHAUER The Practice of Writing in Regensburg: An Overview of the Ninth and Tenth Centuries—CLAIRE DE CAZANOVE Structure et style: observations paléographiques pour l’étude des écritures cursives à Florence aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles—IRENE CECCHERINI Revealing Some Structures and Rules of Book Production (France, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries)—ÉMILIE COTTEREAU-GABILLET Structures of (Mutual) Inspiration: Some Observations on the Circulation of Repetitive Text Formulas in Charters from the Medieval Low Countries (Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries)—ELS DE PAERMENTIER The Writing of Obedientiary Account Rolls at Norwich Cathedral Priory (1256-1344)—HARMONY DEWEZ Charte de fondation et date de dédicace: témoignages narratifs et diplomatiques à l’abbaye Saint-Étienne de Caen—TAMIKO FOURNIER-FUJIMOTO Masters of Micrography: Examples of Medieval Ashkenazi Scribal Artists—RAHEL FRONDA Writing Angles: Palaeographic Considerations on the Inclinaison of the Script—MARIA GURRADO Les actes épiscopaux en Bretagne aux XIe et XIIe siècles: une arme pour la réforme?—CYPRIEN HENRY Königsfelden Abbey and Its First Cartulary: Dealing with Charters in the Fourteenth Century—TOBIAS HODEL The Use of Vernacular and its Graphic and Material Shape in the Epigraphic Discourse: Three Case Studies from Western France—ESTELLE INGRAND-VARENNE The Shape of the Letters and the Dynamics of Composition in Syriac Manuscripts (Fifth-Tenth Century)—AYDA KAPLAN The Parchments of Marmoutier Abbey: Preparation, Shaping, Practices (Mid-Eleventh to Mid-Twelfth Century)—CLAIRE LAMY Scribal Activity and Diplomatic Forms in Western Provence (c. 950-c. 1010)—JEAN-BAPTISTE RENAULT Hand Spotting: The Registers of the Chancery of the Counts of Holland, 1316-1337—JINNA SMIT Rule and Variation in Eleventh-Century English Minuscule—PETER STOKES Princely Communication in the Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Century: A Diplomatic Study of the Charters of the Counts of Hainaut—VALERIA VAN CAMP List of Shelfmarks
Letters from non-professional writers in sixteenth-century France and their linguistic importance
Language Sciences, 2013
The non-conventional spellings found in letters written in French before the 19th century by people whose business was not writing tend to be summarily dismissed as fautes d'orthographe, attributable to the ignorance and even lack of intelligence of the writer. Such attitudes have led to the discarding of potentially valuable material for investigating language variation in the past and for deepening our understanding of the multi-facetted process of sound change. Happily, linguists concerned with variation and change are now overthrowing this prejudice and have begun assembling corpora of such letters from the 17th and 18th centuries. Few texts of this type survive from earlier periods, but we shall see here that some are to be found in the personal letters sent to Marie de Guise, when she was queen and queen-regent in Scotland (1538-1560). In this essay we will look at one of them in detail, focusing on the non-conventional spellings we find there, to discover what they might tell us (a) about the writer's spoken language and (b) about her approach to vernacular spelling. It looks as though the writer deliberately elaborated her own eclectic but highly coherent spelling system, through which she sought to express her individual social identity, in the same way as people seem always to have done with their personal handwriting .
Two recently discovered manuscripts add to our understanding of French adaptations of letter forms and ornamentation all'antiqua at the dawn of the Renaissance. The Hours of Jean de La Rue and Perrine Le Fuzelier and a book of hours in the collection of the National Trust at Tyntesfield are written in a hitherto unstudied and distinctive type of humanistic script, similar to that found in the Missal of Jacques de Beaune. The three manuscripts were made for patrons in Touraine and are datable to around 1506-1510. Although not identical, the letter forms in the script display homogeneity throughout the group. The three manuscripts may also be grouped together by their style of illumination. The miniatures in the two books of hours can be attributed to the Master of Spencer 6, who may also have intervened in the decorated initials and floral borders in the Missal. Jean Bourdichon was responsible for the miniatures in the Missal, and was assisted by the Master of Claude de France. The latter may also have participated in some of the miniatures in the Tyntesfield Hours. This article examines the scribe, who appears to be French, and who transcribed the two books of hours. His letter forms are analysed with relationship to those of Carolingian and contemporary Italian and French scribes, as well as with typographical forms, in order to establish how the scribe adapted and interpreted them to suit local tastes in early sixteenth-century France. Material analysis reveals interconnections between scribes and illuminations, as well as between the different levels of patronage.
The aim of the present article is to explore the scribal punctuation practice in one of Richard Rolle's epistles, Ego dormio, in manuscript Paris Sainte Geneviève 3390. Analyses of samples seek to reveal regular patterns of use concerning punctuation symbols. Special uses of punctuation may indicate either rhetorical or grammatical functions of these symbols. The method of analysis considers contextual information in the description of each punctuation symbol to identify their functions. In addition, we have used earlier works on medieval punctuation in the identification and categorization of symbols along with their already attested functions (mainly Lucas, 1971. The results of the study will be compared with these functions in order to contextualize scribal use of punctuation symbols within the tradition in Middle English manuscripts.
Résidence du Corpus Troporum. Centre d'études médiévales, Auxerre, 19-23 octobre 2005
Bulletin du centre d'études médiévales d'Auxerre| …, 2005
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Old French Narrated Inscriptions
With 6193 preserved manuscripts and 1072 identified medieval authors, Old French was the most influential vernacular language of the European Middle Ages. We use the term "Old French" to denote the linguistic varieties commonly known as les langues d'oïl situated north of the Croissant transition zone (including the British Isles) which separates them from the Old Occitan dialects (les langues d'oc) of southern France.1 Old French was not only spoken and written in France and England, but also in Cyprus and the Holy Land, where French was the language of the ruling class for centuries. Even the Venetian Marco Polo used Old French to relate his travelogues,2 which formed part of the immensely influential fourteenth-century Franco-Italian literary movement. Other vernacular European literary traditions were heavily influenced by the French corpus. The most important writers of Middle High German classicism, such as Wolfram von Eschenbach and Hartmann von Aue, for example, translated and transformed the Old French romances Roman de Perceval ou Le conte du Graal (c. 1180), Erec et Enide (c. 1170) and Le roman d'Yvain ou du Chevalier au lion (c. 1177), all written by Chrétien de Troyes. England's most influential Arthurian text, Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur, is based on his translation of French sources. In this chapter we will gather significant passages of Old French literature, in order to classify them and to establish a tentative typology of narrated inscriptions, their multiple functions and possible interpretations.3
Among all the studies performed on medieval French syntax during the last decade, one construction in particular, variously known in the literature as “stylistic fronting” or “leftward stylistic displacement”, has provoked particularly lively debate. Atheoretically conceived, this construction is characterized by the presence of non-subject constituents to the left of the finite verb, such as adjectives, adverbs, nouns, infinitives, past participles, and prepositional phrases. One or more such elements may appear in both main and subordinate clauses, either to the left or to the right of the subject, when the subject is expressed. Originally at the heart of this debate was the apparent similarity between the medieval French construction and one found in contemporary and historical Scandinavian languages (Holmberg 2000; Hrafnbjargarson 2004). On the basis of a corpus containing instances of leftward stylistic displacement involving infinitives, past participles, and a small group of adverbs, Labelle and Hirschbühler (2013, 2014a, 2014b, 2017) have successfully illustrated that the medieval French construction is different from the Scandinavian one; there remains, however, much work to be done in terms of the holistic description of medieval French leftward stylistic displacement, particularly in view of the full variety of elements that can be displaced. The aim of the current project is twofold: firstly, to continue the descriptive project of Labelle and Hirschbühler (2017) by offering as complete a picture as possible of the totality of morphosyntactic variation that is inherent in this family of constructions, and secondly, to begin to understand what factors may (or may not) condition this variation. To that end, we construct a ~225,000-word plurigeneric corpus from portions of twelve texts ranging in date from the late-twelfth to the mid-fifteenth centuries and undertake a complete description of the leftward stylistic displacement that we find there. In addition to describing the construction itself as it appears through time, we consider three external textual and discursive variables: domain (a macro-version of text type), information structure, and reported discourse status. As a result of our study, we conclude that domain, on its own, is not a particularly good predictor of the morphosyntactic variation intrinsic to leftward stylistic displacement; we find that time, however, is an excellent predictor of this variation, an indication of a construction where change is very much at work. Using a series of decision trees for the information-structural tagging of our data, we also find that leftward stylistic displacement generally bears one of two information-structural values. On the basis of these, we propose a reanalysis of the structure of subordinate clauses in medieval French. With respect to discourse type, we find that discourse type (direct discourse versus narration) is not a good predictor of the morphosyntactic variation that characterizes leftward stylistic displacement. We conclude, finally, that leftward stylistic displacement represents a fertile ground for continued research in medieval French, especially as it pertains to subordinate clauses.
The aim of the present article is to discuss the scribal punctuation practice in one of Richard Rolle's epistles, Ego Dormio, found in two manuscripts that are genetically related: London, Westminster School MS 3 and Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève MS 3390. The analysis of samples seeks both to reveal regular patterns of use concerning punctuation symbols in each text and to test the extent to which there is a correlation between one scribe's use of punctuation marks when compared to the use employed by the other scribe. Although there is a quantitative exploration of the data, the method of analysis also considers contextual information in the description of each punctuation symbol to identify their functions. In addition, earlier works on medieval punctuation in the identification and categorization of symbols along with their already attested functions (following mainly Lucas 1971; Parkes 1992 and Zeeman 1956) have been employed. The results of the study will be compared with these functions in order to contextualize each scribal use of punctuation symbols within the tradition of Middle English manuscripts.