| Paper 304-a | Voicing the 'Not-So-Distant Other': The Representation of the 'Familiar Foreigner' in Late Medieval French Chronicles and Romances
(Language: English)
Pauline Souleau, St Peter's College, University of Oxford / Hertford College, University of Oxford
Index terms: Historiography - Medieval, Language and Literature - French or Occitan, Mentalities |
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| Paper 304-b | Mapping English onto the World: Vernacular Cartography in The Wonders of the East
(Language: English)
Courtney Barajas, Department of English, University of Texas, Austin
Index terms: Geography and Settlement Studies, Language and Literature - Old English, Manuscripts and Palaeography, Politics and Diplomacy |
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| Paper 304-c | Covers and Versions: Translating Medieval Song in London, British Library, MS Arundel 248
(Language: English)
Monica Roundy, Department of Music, Cornell University
Index terms: Language and Literature - Middle English, Language and Literature - French or Occitan, Language and Literature - Latin, Music |
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| Abstract | Paper -a:
This paper proposes to examine the topic of medieval alterity and xenology from the angle of the 'not-so-distant Other' by analysing the way late medieval French chronicles and romances represented the English, German, or Gascon, the Spaniards, or the Scots. Relying on historical and literary works (Froissart’s Chroniques, Le Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris, Perceforest), it intends to shed light on the perception of an ambivalent ‘European other,’ both familiar and foreign; here distorted, there integrated. Focusing especially on the literary and linguistic concepts of (narrative) voice and reported speech, this paper considers the point(s) of view of the observers - author, narrator, or protagonist – as well as the narrative role(s) of these 'familiar foreigners'. Through the lens of this characteristic form of alterity, the relationship between the real and the fictional, the self and the other in the late Middle Ages will be investigated and discussed.
Paper -b:
This paper takes as its subject the Anglo-Saxon text of The Wonders of the East, a medieval liber monstrum which appears in three English manuscripts from the 11th and 12th centuries. It argues that Wonders is a uniquely English text, and that the use of the vernacular is an attempt to spread and validate English usage across various literary and scientific forms. It will show that the use of vernacular neologisms to describe foreign spaces and monstrous creatures is an attempt to explore the potential uses of English and was inspired by a political and cultural environment which encouraged the use of the vernacular in an attempt to grow a national identity.
Paper -c:
The well-documented and contentious - now as then - cultural interactions between the British Isles and the continent in the 13th century are surprisingly difficult to identify in surviving musical sources. Music manuscripts from the continent include many concordances, and among them intriguing variants, but music copied in sources of English provenance is often distinctly different, both in having different stylistic referents and in featuring very few concordances to continental sources. The collection of songs copied in Latin, English, and Anglo-Norman in the manuscript British Library, Arundel 248 offers a welcome glimpse of cultural interaction, featuring not only musical versions of songs transmitted in continental sources, but also linguistic adaptations that may point to the sonic realization of empire's discontents.
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