Introduction

The introduction outlines traditional understandings of literary culture in French and of French literary history in the Middle Ages and makes the case for an alternative view that is less Francocentric, and takes into account the networks outside France instantiated by the production and circulation of texts and manuscripts. The use and forms of French outside France are discussed and some of the theoretical premises of the book are also sketched, particularly Actor-Network theory and Derrida’s account of monolingualism.

Conclusion

The conclusion reviews the findings of the book to ask what kind of communities medieval texts in French instantiate, using the work of Giorgio Agamben and Jean-Luc Nancy. It is argued that French language texts seek above all to establish a supralocal history, genealogy and pedigree, and that French as a national language emerges in part as an attempt to claim this pedigree.

History, Time, and Empire

This chapter focuses on the manuscripts of the Histoire ancienne made in Acre between roughly 1260 and Acre’s fall in 1291. The four Acre manuscripts are not just highly sophisticated, visually exquisite artefacts: they are also cultural productions of a specific place and time, and we situate them in the beleaguered frontier-land that is the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. That this text written in French had currency in the Latin Kingdom is significant in that French was the common vernacular in the crusader states; and the French they used was particularly mobile and translatable, thus adapted to further diffusion to audiences in Europe. Language and texts—and the vision of past, present, and future they purveyed—were one of the main instruments of the network on which the Latin Kingdom depended for its fragile survival.

Living History

This chapter discusses Peter Langtoft’s French-language epic chronicle of British history (c. 1307 and disseminated mainly in north-eastern England), and its most luxurious surviving manuscript: London, BL, Royal MS 20 A II. This early fourteenth-century manuscript contained other historical, lyric, and prophetic material in French and English; in the second half of the same century, abridged segments of the Lancelot en prose and Queste del Saint Graal were appended, along with a letter about recent events in the eastern Mediterranean. We ask: how does a historical text produce itself, how does it authorize itself, and what are the roles of language and of discourse? We show how the Arthurian prose romance extracts in French adapt the manuscript’s earlier contents to England’s changing political and cultural concerns. The use of a single language—French—enhances and directs the potential for meaningful conflict within and beyond the language community.

Local French outside France

This chapter juxtaposes two case studies of texts in French with an exclusively local dissemination outside France: Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis (c. 1137) and the second mise en prose of the Roman de Troie (c. 1270). In these instances, French is used as a cosmopolitan language with a multilingual readership, but the particular form and the aesthetic developed have a local flavour. These texts are not in a two-way dialogue with literary culture in France but show the existence of autonomous Francophone literary cultures in other places. In the case of Gaimar, ‘French literary culture’ had barely emerged in France. In the case of the prose Roman de Troie, the manuscripts are our focus, for the local visual style of the manuscripts is as striking as the text’s formal and linguistic makeover.

Dark Networks

This chapter pursues the theme of travel, focusing on how both the representation and, crucially, the non-representation of movements, travels, and networks become key to the retooling of some texts in transmission. In the first section of this chapter, we show how the prose Tristan is made to travel, indeed is relocated to the Mediterranean, through a prologue and lengthy prequel; the whole of British culture is thereby glossed as a dislocation of, and exile from, the holy East. The second section takes a well-known and much-studied manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264, and follows a textual (non-)thread via the Paon (Peacock) cycle of Alexander texts, to trace the career of a poet, Jean de le Mote, whose career exemplifies cultural networks that today are often overlooked.

The Movement of Books

This chapter consists of two manuscript case studies concerning Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS 5667 and British Library Royal 20 D 1. The former is manuscript of the Tristan en prose that is confected from two parts, one made in France and one in Italy. The second is the earliest manuscript of the second redaction of the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, made in Naples but then moving from Italy to Spain and from Spain to France. Both artefacts, though in different ways, are the result of textual bricolage. We trace this bricolage in each instance and the movement of books that produce cultural networks.

Francophone Literary Culture on the Move

This chapter connects northern Italy with networked vectors of transmission encompassing the Low Countries, Britain, France, and the eastern Mediterranean: Arthurian prose romance is a vehicle for, and an instrument of, a pan-European chivalric vision of the past, present, and future. This Christianizing interest in figures like Tristan and Guiron le Courtois connects Italy with the Low Countries and the eastern Mediterranean in particular. A key feature of the transmission of this material, and one that grows in importance by the fourteenth century, is compilation. The famous Arthurian compilation (c. 1270) of Rusticiaus de Pise gathers episodes from different romance traditions. Guiron le Courtois circulates in ever-expanding compilations between the Low Countries and Northern Italy.