Centres and trajectories VS ideal unity

Posted by: MFLC Team 11 years, 2 months ago

By Bill Burgwinkle and Nicola Morato

French is the most innovative of the Romance languages, having achieved a structural and psychological distance from Latin. French was also the first Romance language to develop a system of literary genres which gradually became autonomous from medieval Latin literary production and - "propter sui faciliorem ac delectabiliorem vulgaritatem", as Dante says in De vulgari eloquentia - catalyzed and heavily influenced the early development of Italian and Spanish literature. This is one possible starting point from which to consider the medieval circulation of French literature, the main theme of our project.

This has long been a favoured topic, an early model of which we can see in Paul Meyer's groundbreaking essay, De l'expansion de la langue française en Italie (1904). More than a century later, we are probably less interested in the notion of "expansion", a movement from centre(-s) to periphery(-ies), than in mapping a less linear reality: a reality that appeared to be of increasing complexity as in-depth studies multiplied. One illustrious example among many others is the work of Gianfranco Folena and Alberto Limentani and their school on the French presence in Veneto. From the earliest attestations of French literary production, texts were far from constituting a monolithic reality (that is to say, a coherent projection of the birth of a modern European "nation"). Attestations are initially fragmentary, as was the French territory (i.e. the royal domain) from the political, administrative and economic points of view. Before Philippe Auguste, and even after, the literary reality of "France la douce" was in fact composed of multiple centres, trajectories and areas, continually created and destroyed in an age of almost uninterrupted internal and external conflict. In fact, French language and literature ('Francophonie' and 'Francographie') were never contained within – or better yet, were practically unrelated to – the reality of French borders until the 16th century.

In the terms popularised by Ernst Kantorowicz, that unity and superposition had always existed from the symbolic point of view (think, for instance, of the Serments de Strasbourg...), but from the standpoint of cultural history, we might say that this notion of a unified territory called France was perceived as real precisely because it first existed as an ideal. It was the growing force and prestige of the French Kingdom that only progressively established the perceived supremacy of 'Parisian' French; yet that supremacy does not map easily onto the literary production of 13th and 14th centuries, in which Picardie, Champagne, Flanders, and England play major roles in the establishment of a French-language canon.