Feeling in French in Late Medieval and Early Modern England

Image courtesy of the British Library Illuminated Manuscripts Catalogue Online, Royal MS 14 E II, fol. 77.

The linguistic range of late medieval England was diverse, complex and socially coded. Multilingual expression was the norm, and the use of Latin, French and English both sustained and was dictated by particular social dynamics. Individual languages had different meaning in relation to each other. French is still frequently associated with literary culture and emotional expression in the Anglophone world. It is a universal ‘language of love,’ which is also a language of grief, suffering, joy, anger, and hope. This project explores vocabularies of emotion in French in late Medieval England. Closer attention to feeling in French is fundamental to the analysis of literary emotional expression in Middle English, richly imbued with French feeling. More developed attention to the richness of emotional expression across languages and cultures in in the past will help nuance discussions of bilingualism and the communication of emotion today.

Publications

2017 (forthcoming) Reading Christine de Pizan in England, 1399-1929. Boydell & Brewer 

2016 ‘The History of Emotions and Middle English Literature,’ Literature Compass, 1-13. doi:10.1111/lic3.12318          

2016 ‘Reading French in England’. In Spaces for Reading: Medieval and Early Modern Textuality, edited by Carrie Griffin and Mary Flannery, pp. 63-78. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. New Middle Ages Series.

2015 ‘French Feeling: Language, Sex and Identity in Henry V’. In Shakespeare and the Emotions, edited by Mark Houlahan, Katrina O’Loughlin and R. S. White, pp. 59-68. Palgrave, History of Emotions Series.

2015 ‘“How to be Both”: Bilingual Emotions and Balade Sequences in Late Medieval England,’ in Authority, Gender and Emotions in Late Medieval and Early Modern England. Palgrave, History of Emotions Series, pp. 51-65.

2015 ‘“Je Hé Guerre”: War and Peace in the Prison Poetry of Charles of Orleans’.  In War and Emotion: Medieval to Romantic Literature, edited by S, Downes, A. Lynch and K. O’Loughlin, pp. 60-76. Palgrave, History of Emotions Series.

2015 ‘War as Emotion: Cultural fields of Contact and Feeling’.  In War and Emotion: Medieval to Romantic Literature, edited by Downes, Lynch and O’Loughlin. Palgrave, History of Emotions Series, pp. 1-23. Co-authored with Lynch and O’Loughlin.

2015 Emotions and War: Medieval to Romantic Literature, eds. Stephanie Downes, Katrina O’Loughlin and Andrew Lynch, contracted. Palgrave Macmillan.

2015 ‘Turning to Europe: Historical Fiction, Women’s Voices, and the History of Emotions in Australia,’ in Australian Genre Crossings: Community and Exchange in Popular Fiction, ed. Kim Wilkins.

2014 ‘The History of Emotions and Middle English Literature,’ Literature Compass (commissioned article, manuscript due March, co-authored with Dr Rebecca McNamara, University of Sydney).

2014 'Reading French in England,’ Spaces for Reading: Medieval and Early Modern Textuality, Boydell and Brewer, ed. Carrie Griffin and Mary Flannery.

2014 ‘French Feeling: Language, Sex and Identity in Henry V,’ in Shakespeare and the Emotions, ed. Katrina O’Loughlin, Bob White.