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  • The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War
  • Marianne Ailes
Ardis Butterfield. The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xxx, 444. £60.00; $99.00.

The last twenty years have borne witness to a major shift in the scholarship of medieval insular texts, particularly narratives, with a much greater appreciation of the multilingual context of medieval England. A growing interest in working across linguistic divides and a resistance to the disciplinary divisions of academia have been seen in the thriving biennial conferences on romance in medieval England, which attract specialists in different linguistic cultures, and in the publication of a few studies that bring together a combination of English, French, and Latin material. (See, for example, Laura Ashe, Fiction and History in England, 1066–1200 [2007]; Neil Cartlidge, ed., Boundaries in Medieval Romance [2008]; and Keith Busby and Christopher Kleinhenz, eds., Medieval Multilingualism: The Francophone World and Its Neighbours [2010]). Ardis Butterfield's wide-ranging and erudite analysis of the background and context of Chaucer's work is thus very timely.

This ambitious study is informed by Derrida and by postcolonial theory, but the theory never overwhelms the textual analysis. The title itself is heavy with meaning and allusion, punning on “familiar,” recalling the family links between the textual communities of France and England, while at the same time alluding to the concept of familiar alterity (Lacanian extimité). Chaucer is referred to in the subtitle, and yet Butterfield challenges what she calls our “Chaucer-centred” view that pushes other important authors to the margins. While it cannot be reduced to a simple point, the main thesis of this study is that the French of England and the English vernacular cannot be considered in isolation from each other. This perspective is very welcome. On occasion it may seem that Butterfield is slightly overstating her case and suggesting that French and English are scarcely separate languages (e.g., 99). This renders significant the minor typographical error of footnote 61 in Chapter 1, where we read that Caxton translated a work by Christine de Pisan into (rather than out of) French. It is clear, however, that French must be considered as an insular vernacular alongside and interacting with English.

Part I focuses on the background to the period of conflict between France and England up to 1300 and examines the concept of nation and the relationship between nation and language. While there has been a [End Page 303] growing awareness of a medieval Francophonia among French scholars, there is still a tendency, almost inevitable in our period of “post-nation” states, to consider French literature as belonging to France. Yet for much of this period, French literature was not only read outside the borders of modern France, but it was produced outside modern France. For someone who, like Chaucer, was based in London or the royal court, French was not alien or foreign but part of the local culture. All this is clear in Butterfield's analysis in which she draws upon the work of major historians as well as literary scholars in a truly interdisciplinary approach. She begins in Chapter 1 with two francophone writers from outside continental France in different periods: Wace and Victor Hugo, the former a “Norman” from Jersey, the latter a Frenchman exiled to Jersey and then Guernsey, illustrating the ambiguity of linguistic identity. The Channel both divides and connects. The analysis of the whole of Part I demonstrates the linguistic awareness of many writers from both sides of the Channel and in both vernaculars. This section also includes an excellent review of recent work on the use of Anglo-Norman (56–57). Butterfield does question whether Anglo-French can be considered properly a dialect, though given that she is writing here about the early period it is difficult to know how the French of England could be considered as anything other than a “dialect” of French, in the same way as “francien” was a dialect of French. What is evident is that the period of the Hundred Years War was preceded by one in which linguistic exchange between England and...

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