The French of Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Jocelyn Wogan-Browne by Thelma Fenster and Carolyn P. Collette (review)

The theme of this festschrift in honor of Jocelyn Wogan-Browne must have picked itself. The French of Medieval England is the subtitle of the influential collection Language and Culture in Medieval England, which she edited, and is also firmly embedded in the French of England Translation Series, which she founded. As the editors write in their introduction (and Felicity Riddy in her foreword), Jocelyn's work has been trail-blazing, and this collection shows the richness of the vistas that she has opened up.

The first essay deals with the Comput by Philippe de Thaon, the earliest named vernacular French author. Thomas O'Donnell examines the Latin glosses to the Anglo-Norman text in one of the manuscripts (Cambridge University Library, MS Add. 4166, Fragment 9), and reflects on the historical circumstances following the Norman Conquest in which it made sense to gloss Anglo-Norman into Latin rather than vice versa. An edition of the glosses is provided in an appendix to the essay. After a more theoretical discussion of translation by Emma Campbell, we come to some close readings of Anglo-Norman poems. Monika Otter compares the French and English versions of the Prisoner's Lament with the Latin song that provided the melody, the Latin Planctus ante nescia. The Latin text is given in an appendix, followed by French and English verses with syllable counts (my counts for some of the English verses are different). Fiona Somerset achieves the same satisfying balance of textual analysis and contextualization in her discussion of two thirteenth-century political songs, both extant in interestingly different versions, all of them printed, with translation, at the end of the essay. Andrew Taylor contributes an essay on the Chanson d'Aspremont, addressing the intriguing question of why the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Augustine's in Canterbury may have wanted to acquire, and perhaps produce, a chanson de geste. Robert Grosseteste's Chasteau d'amour is the topic of Nicholas Watson's essay, which shows exactly what Langland's Piers Plowman owes to Grosseteste and where these two allegorical poets diverge from each other.

The term "The French of England" has certain advantages over Anglo-Norman and Anglo-French, but a drawback of the term is that this French was spoken and written not just in England, but also in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. It is good to see this recognized in Serge Lusignan's analysis of a set of surviving documents (many of them by Scottish writers) relating to the Anglo-Scottish Wars. An illuminating table shows the correlations between text type and language choice: some genres of documents are predominantly in Latin (e.g., debentures and warrants) while others (letters and petitions) are typically in French.

Two essays focus on text collections that Jocelyn Wogan-Browne has helped us to rediscover. Richard Ingham looks at French borrowings in the South English Legendary. The received wisdom is that it was the social prestige of the "upper classes" that encouraged lexical borrowing from French, but, as Ingham clearly shows, the semantic domains of French-derived items in the South English Legendary go well beyond "posh" words: there are, for instance, "action verbs" (e.g., exchange, pass, cry), verbs for abstract relations (accord, betray) and for emotional states (e.g., annoy, suffer). The community most likely to be responsible for this lexical diffusion is the clergy. The case is convincing, though the separation of the clergy from the secular "upper classes" is perhaps over-schematic (they often came from the same families). Christopher Baswell's essay analyzes the saints' lives in the Campsey manuscript. He focuses on disability, and the focus is amply justified by his exposition of the narrative possibilities generated by disabled bodies in these texts.

The chapters by Mark Ormrod and Maryanne Kowaleski are concerned not with the French of English people...