Languages, Cultures and Visual Studies

Learning Anglo-French: French Language-Learning Manuscripts in Britain, c.1200-c.1500

Professor Thomas Hinton is PI on ‘Learning Anglo-French: French Language-Learning Manuscripts in Britain, c.1200-c.1500’ (LAF), which will run from 2023 to 2028. It was originally awarded as a European Research Council Consolidator Grant (€1.8 million) and is now funded by a UKRI Frontier Research Guarantee.

French in medieval Britain was both a language of culture and power and a second mother tongue for a bilingual minority of the population. This unusual situation makes it a key case study for grasping how multilingual societies work, yet the nature and methods of its transmission remain mysterious. ‘Learning Anglo-French’ (LAF) combines traditional and cutting-edge methodologies to address vital questions about the history of vernacular language acquisition and multilingualism in medieval Britain. 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, the earliest known tradition of modern language pedagogy.

The project is comprised of four key objectives:

  1. Understanding the transmission of French in medieval Britain: who was teaching French, and who was learning it? Were women accessing these materials as well as men? How did the language taught, and the perception of it, change through the period
  2. Investigating the early history of languages pedagogy: what teaching strategies were used, and how might these relate to current practice? Why did people want to learn French? And how might a better understanding of what an education in French looked like inform our appreciation of medieval writers such as Chaucer or Hoccleve?
  3. Exploring the effects of pandemic: Since the LAF corpus involves manuscripts produced before, during and after the Black Death, it provides the opportunity to investigate how it affected aspects of British society and culture such as book production or animal management, as well as how the pandemic impacted on the transmission of French.
  4. Expanding the boundaries of codicology: Combining traditional and experimental approaches to manuscript study, LAF explores how far it is now possible to go in analysing medieval manuscripts and uncovering their hidden histories.

A cohesive picture of the teaching of French in medieval Britain requires collaboration and the integration of methodologies from different disciplines. The LAF project team includes two full-time post docs, Dr Edward Mills (a specialist in Medieval French) and Dr Sean Doherty (a specialist in Bioarchaeology), alongside colleagues in Digital Humanities and three Visiting Fellows who will spend time in Exeter during the second half of the grant period. The project’s outputs, which will include a free-to-use database and a landmark edited volume, will open up new research avenues across multiple fields, including Modern Languages, Linguistics, English, History, Archaeology, Codicology and Digital Humanities.