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date: 06 November 2024

Medieval French Philology and Overseas Francophonie Literaturelocked

Medieval French Philology and Overseas Francophonie Literaturelocked

  • Sara RitcheySara RitcheyUniversity of Tennessee at Knoxville

Summary

Nineteenth-century French scholars collected oral songs and tales from “folk” communities as evidence of an unbroken French spirit that endured within a living heritage of medieval literatures. This process of collecting a premodern linguistic heritage in the form of poésies populaires unfolded according to instructions promulgated by Jean-Jacques Ampère on behalf of the Comité de la langue, de l’histoire, et des arts de la France, which convened in Paris from 1852 to 1857. Provincial correspondents gathered folk poésies from rural laborers and peasants in the provinces and sent them to the Comité’s primary inspectors, who determined their authenticity as specimens of French patrimony. These primary inspectors included some of the founding scholars of French medieval studies, such as Paulin Paris and Prosper Mérimée. Their conceptualization of “folk” communities as living vectors of medieval literatures is imprinted on the disciplinary structures that they founded, baked into the genealogy of the archive.

Overseas French-speaking populations were also subject to this process of verbal extraction and temporalization. In Lower Canada, philologists, musicologists, and proto-ethnographers collected songs from First Nations and Acadian communities, which they assumed to preserve unevolved repertoires since contact. In coastal Louisiana, philologists gathered contes from creole-speaking freed people and translated medieval literatures, such as the Chanson de Roland and the fables of La Fontaine, into Louisiana creole; they analogized the “devolution” of creole from French to the process by which Old French derived from Latin, and sought in creole expressions a key to unlock new understandings of medieval French literatures. In the Antilles, French philologists produced orthographies of creoles as evidence of the simple, premodern civilizational status of their speakers and as a justification for progressive settler-colonial regimes. Other scholarship has outlined a model of critical philology that exposes these hierarchies and distortions in the construction of the archive of medieval French literatures and offers alternate grounds for historicization.

Subjects

  • Middle Ages and Renaissance (500-1600)
  • 19th Century (1800-1900)

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