The Values of French Language and Literature in the European Middle Ages

The Values of French Language and Literature in the European Middle Ages (2015-2020) is a research project directed by Prof. Simon Gaunt (PI) and hosted by the Department of French, King's College London, in collaboration with King's Digital Lab. For more information, visit https://tvof.ac.uk/ (available until 2030).

The Values of French examines the nature and value of the use of French in Europe during a crucial period, 1100-1450, less in terms of its cultural prestige (the traditional focus of scholarship) than of its role as a supralocal, transnational language, particularly in Western Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean. The project fosters collaboration between, and cuts across, different intellectual and national scholarly traditions, drawing on expertise in codicology, critical theory, linguistics, literature, and philology; it involves a range of scholars, entailing empirical research around a complex and widely disseminated textual tradition vital to medieval understandings of European history and identity, the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César. This case study grounds and stimulates broader speculative reflection on two questions concerning linguistic identity. What is the relation historically between language and identity in Europe? How are cognate languages demarcated from each other? Indeed, its final aim, through and beyond its consideration of French as a lingua franca, is to interrogate that language’s role in the emergence of a European identity in the Middle Ages.

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 670726, see: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/670726).

Selected publications:

Gaunt, Simon, ‘Texte et/ou manuscrit? A propos de l’Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César’, in En Français hors de France. Textes, livres, collections du Moyen Âge, ed. Sylvie Lefèvre and Fabio Zinelli (Paris: RLiR, 2021), pp. 35-58.

Gaunt, Simon, ‘Philology and the Global Middle Ages: British Library Royal MS 20 D 1’, Medioevo Romanzo 40 (2016): 27-47.

Gaunt, Simon, ‘French Literature Abroad: Towards an Alternative History of French Literature’, Interfaces 1 (2015): 25-61.

Morcos, Hannah, 'Compilation as Palimpsest: Tracing Origins of the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César in the Liber Floridus', Queeste 28.1 (2021): 277-311

Morcos, Hannah, Geoffroy Noël, and Marcus Husar, 'Lemmatization in the collaborative editorial workflow of a medieval French text: The digital edition of the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César', Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 36, Supplement 2 (2021): ii203–ii209.

Ravenhall, Henry, 'All Roads Lead to Rome: Revisiting the Pairing of the Histoire ancienne jusqu'à César and the Faits des Romains in the Thirteenth Century', Romania 139 (2021): 5-36.

Ravenhall, Henry, 'L’expérience The Values of French Language and Literature in the European Middle Ages', in Autour du Roman de Florimont. Approches multidisciplinaires à la complexité textuelle médiévale, ed. Marta Materni. Quaderni di Francigena 2 (2020): 151-163.

Rachetta, Maria Teresa, ‘Sull’Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César: le origini della versione abbreviata; il codice Wien ÖNB cod. 2576. Per la storia di una tradizione’ Francigena 5 (2019): 27-57.

Rachetta, Maria Teresa, ‘Sulla sezione storica del Tresor: Brunetto Latini e l’Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César’, Medioevo Romanzo 42 (2018): 284-311.

Ventura, Simone, ‘Digital Editing and Linguistic Analysis: The First Redaction of the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César’, Textual Cultures 12 (2019).

Ventura, Simone, ‘The manuscripts of the First Redaction of the the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César (13th century): Textual Variation and Linguistic Coding’, Medioevo Romanzo 41 (2017): 316-363.