This article examines what a group of medieval conversation manuals designed to teach spoken French to the English-the manières de langage-can tell us about the use of spoken French within late medieval England. Beginning with the observation that several of the manières dialogues are set in England, it argues that the manières model the French required to interact with three groups of incoming French-speakers on English soil: travellers, merchants and artisans, and agricultural labourers. The approach pursued complements previous studies of the manières, including my own, which have established their fitness for preparing English learners of French to use French on the Continent. At the same time as the argument addresses the topics of French pedagogy and French acquisition in late medieval England, it thus also contributes to developing understandings of late medieval English multilingualism and of intercultural contact within late medieval England.
This article introduces the nonmedievalist reader to the multilingual landscape of England 700-1400. Building on recent work exploring in particular the relationships among English, French, and Latin in medieval England, it discusses a series of "multilingual moments" from a range of sources, including letters, poems, travel writings, and French language teaching texts. Together, these examples build a picture of the complex interrelationships of languages, both spoken and written, that existed for medieval English people at home and when traveling abroad. Then, as now, people can be seen using their linguistic resources for pragmatic and creative effect. We demonstrate that multilingualism is nothing new. From a methodological perspective, our work also underlines the importance of viewing linguistic attitudes in their particular intellectual and historical contexts.
This essay focuses on the interrelationship of the romances and the conduct poems contained in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61 (ca. 1500). Drawing on the work of Felicity Riddy, it examines the contrasting ways in which these texts articulate a particular bourgeois ethos. Tensions that arise from their different approaches to this phenomenon are read as evidence of an attitude towards the matter of good conduct that is at once more searching and more provisional than that which has typically been attributed to the milieu in which Ashmole 61 was copied and read.
I am grateful to FRETS editors Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and Thelma Fenster for inviting me to contribute this volume to their series and for offering much helpful commentary on my typescript. I would also like to express my thanks to this volume's anonymous reviewer, whose feedback has prompted me to clarify my thinking at some key junctures.For answering various questions and for discussing my work on French teaching with me, it is a pleasure to thank
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