Medieval Francophone Literary Culture Outside France: Studies in the Moving Word

This volume gathers 23 papers from two Conferences organised by the AHRC funded project Medieval French Literary Culture Outside France (MFLCOF), that took place at University College London, 6-7 June 2013 and at King's College Cambridge, 10-12 April 2014. The medieval world was already a multilingual environment and not one that necessarily corresponds to current national borders. French already acted as a 'global' language by the end of the 12th century, and facilitated communication between speakers of various languages regardless of differing cultural, ethnic and political backgrounds. In the 12th-15th century, a number of French literary texts were written in England, the Low Countries, Italy, and even further afield, in Cyprus, the Peloponnese, and the Holy Land. Despite this historical evidence, many of the extant French texts and manuscripts are (often acritically) classified as 'French' in library catalogues or repertories. This volume suggests a new way of reading Medieval French Literary Culture in its global dimension, by a close study of some major dynamics of production and circulation of French texts and manuscripts. It focusses on the two major axes of transmission of francophone textual culture: one going from Normandy and England across Flanders, to Burgundy; another across the Alps to Northern Italy and then to Cyprus and the Levant.