The French of England-- a term meant to cover both Anglo-Norman and Anglo-French, and which could almost more properly be "the Frenches of England" -- is a major field for fresh exploration. This website gives information about material on the French documents and texts of England: on translations of previously untranslated and unpublished work, and on current research. Nearly one thousand literary texts are listed in the most important survey of Anglo-Norman literature to date.The total documentary corpus composed in the French of England is unquantified and probably unquantifiable, but it is large and significant, and the subject of much important recent work both by historians and by linguists (especially as there has been fresh scholarship in recent years on the nature and uses of the fourteenth- and early fifteenth- century French of England).
The French of England is a field that welcomes and benefits today's newer approaches in, for example, post-colonial and feminist and post-disciplinary studies, which seek to cross, re-align, and rethink disciplinary boundaries. Scholars are asking new questions about the ways in which "French" texts are "English" and about the interrelations between insular French literature, that of the continent, and the literatures of other medieval cultures. Historians and literary scholars taking a post-colonial approach recognize that the French of England was at various times the language of a political and military elite, while scholarship on medieval women continues to demonstrate the importance of vernacular records and texts, not only in the history of women in England, but for medieval scholarship at large. In the field of insular vernacular pastoralia and devotional texts, where clerics as well as religious and laywomen play significant roles, for instance, it has been estimated that French of England texts number approximately 500 as against Middle English's 800: a significant corpus, without which accounts of vernacular literary production in England are seriously incomplete.
England is the location of the earliest historical writing in French and has an important continuing tradition of such writing from the early twelfth into the fourteenth century and beyond.
ANGLO-FRENCH
Used in scholarship of a French spoken in England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In this period, it was not usually the first language of those who spoke it, but it was a frequently taught second language and an important language of record. The term may also be used to describe continental French texts circulating in copies made in England, and for French used as a language of record on the Continent by English speakers. More recently, Anglo-French has been used to refer to all the types of French associated with England.
ANGLO-NORMAN
Linguistically and historically, the question of what can be called "Anglo-Norman" is complicated. For scholars of language and literature, Anglo-Norman increasingly refers to the variety of the French language used in England from the Norman Conquest to the fifteenth century (some scholars still use "Anglo-French" for the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries).
