The database is aimed at describing all manuscripts copied in England between 11 that contain French literature.
I am also grateful to the staff and librarians of Cambridge University Library for letting me use their collections, and to the various libraries and archives that have made their collections available to researchers through digitization, without which this project would not have been possible. I would like to express my sincere thanks to the Europeana Foundation for the financial support that enabled this project, to the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) for research travel support, and to Ben Companjen for his technical expertise and support. I collected the contents of the catalogue from existing catalogue records and primary research over the course of four months, and the website and programming for the data analysis component of the project was created by Ben Companjen at Leiden University’s Centre for Digital Scholarship. This catalogue was produced thanks to a research grant from the Europeana Foundation. Manuscripts have been chosen as a focal point because, as unique written witnesses to language use, they provide unmatched large-scale data about England’s linguistic situation. The project approaches these questions through an exploration of all manuscripts produced between 11 that contain French literature. This database aims to shed light on the status of French following the Norman Conquest, including who read it, when, and in which contexts. And whether the Conquest itself led to significant linguistic upheaval has been subject to much debate, with scholars questioning how far, and in which contexts, French permeated medieval society. As Douglas Kibbee (1991) and others have pointed out, the Normans had, long before the Conquest, established powerful ties to England, including, perhaps most famously, the 1002 marriage between the Anglo-Saxon king Æthelred the Unready and Emma of Normandy.
Yet scholars have become increasingly interested in evaluating the significance of the Conquest for England’s linguistic history. The Conquest has become so important for the history of the English language that ir is often treated as the end of the Old English period and the start of the Middle English period. The Norman Conquest of 1066 is often understood as a major turning point in the linguistic history of England, since it placed French-speaking Normans in the high ranks of both secular and religious administration. Homepage Intercultural Dialogue and Multilingualism in Post-Conquest England: A Database of French Literary Manuscripts Produced Between 1100-1550
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