Tuesday 29 October, 5.15-6.30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Sarah Bridge (St. Hilda's) – ‘Thinking Multilingually in Fourteenth-Century England: Nicole Bozon’s Contes Moralisés'

The Contes moralisés, written in the fourteenth century by the Franciscan friar Nicole Bozon, is a medieval exempla collection written in Anglo-Norman French. Although texts of this genre appear to have been enormously popular for use in preaching, it is the only example of such a text in a vernacular language. Critical attention has thus centred around the question of language choice: what was the appeal of French to the  English author and audiences of this text? This paper will attempt to nuance our answers to this question by focusing on the multilingualism inherent to the Contes moralisés, both in its manuscript context, and within the text itself. By developing a fuller picture of the ways in which the three languages of the text interact, and using Thomas Hinton’s concept of ‘thinking through multilingualism’, it will be possible to reach a better understanding of how and why French might have been used.