Recipient organisationUniversity of ExeterSource-published name: University of Exeter
Funding£1.6M
PeriodSept 2023 — Sept 2028
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
In medieval Britain, over fifty handwritten books still survive that were used to teach French as a second language—and no one has yet studied them as a coherent group. This matters because medieval Britain was a multilingual society where French functioned as both a high-status cultural language and a second vernacular. Understanding how people actually learned French in that period could reveal broader lessons about how multilingual societies transmit languages across generations. Current scholarship tends to treat these teaching texts in isolation, stripped from the physical books that contained them. This project will instead analyse each manuscript as a complete learning programme, using digital codicology, linguistic analysis, and even DNA and protein analysis of the materials. This is primarily fundamental, curiosity-driven research into medieval language acquisition and manuscript culture. It has no immediate practical application. However, the open-access database and interactive data formats it produces will allow historians, linguists, and archaeologists to ask new questions about education, cultural exchange, and multilingualism in pre-modern Europe. Similar fundamental work on historical language learning has previously reshaped how we understand the development of modern European vernaculars.
View original technical description
French in medieval Britain was both a language of culture and a second vernacular. This unusual situation makes it a key case study for grasping how multilingual societies work. Yet the means by which the language was transmitted in Britain are still poorly understood. Learning Anglo-French (LAF) draws on recent methodological advances to address vital questions about the history of vernacular language acquisition and multilingualism in medieval Britain; simultaneously, it explores how far it is now possible to go in analysing medieval manuscripts and uncovering their hidden histories. Its central corpus is a group of over fifty manuscripts made in Britain between the 13th and 15th centuries containing texts used to teach French. LAF presents two notable innovations. First, its focus on manuscripts diverges from current scholarly practice, which tends to approach French language-learning materials as individual texts abstracted from their material contexts. In LAF, each manuscript will be understood as containing a specific programme of French learning, with relevant materials grouped together in differing constellations that are yet to be studied cohesively. Second, the manuscripts will be subjected to holistic analysis at a level that has rarely been attempted for any medieval materials, with results integrated into an open-access database and disseminated through high-profile publications. The analyses envisaged will include digital codicology, linguistic analysis and DNA and protein analysis. Together, these investigations will uncover concrete answers to problems that have historically appeared intractable yet crucial: Where was French being learned? What kind of French? How, by whom, and in what contexts? The presentation of data in interactive and searchable formats will enable the formulation of new research questions across a range of fields, including Modern Languages, English Studies, History, Codicology, Education, Linguistics and Archaeology.
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