Women, Multilingualism, and Literate Culture in Late Medieval England

FAIN: FA-57813-14

Jocelyn Gladys Wogan-Browne
Fordham University (Bronx, NY 10458-9993)

This book-project offers a new account of women's literate culture in late medieval England and further establishes the multilingual nature of English medieval society. Unstudied women's texts and documents in the French of England are a major focus, but are treated in relation to English and some Latin texts. Historical factors differentiate women's multilingualism from men's, but gendering multilingualism does not create a separate feminised space. Rather, it opens up women's participation in a multilingual society's changing configurations of language, literature, and documentation. The book adds new texts and contexts to English literary history, explores the multilingual diversity of late medieval women's culture in hitherto unattempted ways, and shows that although ideas of mother-tongue have sustained fictions of nation, empire, and monolingual literary canons since the Middle Ages, medieval English culture complicates modern notions of nation and language.

Associated Products

Multilingualism and Medieval England: Rethinking Language Learning and Literary " (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Multilingualism and Medieval England: Rethinking Language Learning and Literary "
Author: Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
Abstract: The multilingualism of medieval England was once highly occluded in the nationalizing conception of modern literatures and languages under which modern university disciplines were originally set up. French was supposed both to have suppressed English and then to have become ossified and degenerate in the late medieval ages, by being cut off from its 'national homeland'. This paper looks at medieval language acquisition and models of literacy, making the necessary distinctions between writing, reading and speaking in medieval language acquisition and models of literacy,and showing that late medieval women had important roles both in teaching, speaking and reading French as well as being important commissioners and patrons of members of the clerical culture). The oral culture of women, the use of French-language access in their primers and psalters and the linguistic phenomenology of late medieval French (in fact alive and changing) are one example of the continuing presence and importance of of French in later medieval England to set alongside other French-language practices in documentary and literary culture and suggest both the inadequacy of monoglot treatments of the vernacular and suggest some new cultural landscapes to integrate int our accounts of England's literate culture in the Middle Ages.
Date: 04/11/2014
Conference Name: Center for Medieval Studies, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary

"After Arundel and After Gerson: Francophone Spirituality in Fifteenth Century England" (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: "After Arundel and After Gerson: Francophone Spirituality in Fifteenth Century England"
Author: Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
Abstract: Amidst continuing concern with Lollardy and heresy, recent attention has turned to the nuances and heterogenous nature of orthodox religious writing in England. This paper deals with a neglected strand of such work: frequently owned by elite women and written in French, late medieval francophone devotion in England was free from the attention of medieval clerical censors and also largely free from that of modern scholars. But there are large numbers of French-language devotional and thelogical texts composed and translated in England and circulating there from abroad and they are by no means uninteresting or dull in their perceived orthodoxy.
Date: 11/25/2014
Conference Name: KIngs College London, Centre for Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages

“The Invisible Archive: Later Medieval French in England”, Speculum, 90.3 (2015), pp. 653-73. (Article)
Title: “The Invisible Archive: Later Medieval French in England”, Speculum, 90.3 (2015), pp. 653-73.
Author: Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
Abstract: Argues for and illustrates the importance of women's learning and teaching French in medieval England
Year: 2015
Access Model: subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Speculum: Journal of Medieval Studies
Publisher: Medieval Academy of America

. “The Tongues of the Nightingale: hertely redyng at English Courts”, invited essay for New Directions in Medieval Manuscript Studies and Reading Practices: Essays in Honor of Derek Pearsall, ed. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, John J. Thompson and Sarah Baechle (Book Section)
Title: . “The Tongues of the Nightingale: hertely redyng at English Courts”, invited essay for New Directions in Medieval Manuscript Studies and Reading Practices: Essays in Honor of Derek Pearsall, ed. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, John J. Thompson and Sarah Baechle
Author: Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
Editor: Kathryn Kerby-fulton, John J Thompson and Sarah Baechle
Abstract: Compares a complex little commented on francophone poem composed for Eleanor of Provence, queen of Henry III with a later anglophone poem for Anne, duchess of Buckingham to argue for the multilingualism of English cultural production as more importantly multilingual than national.
Year: 2014
Primary URL Description: can't find a link in worldcat; googling title pulls the book up however
Access Model: printed book
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Book Title: New Directions in Medieval Manuscript Studies and Reading Practices
ISBN: 978-0-268-0332

"Parchment and Pure Flesh"; Elizabeth de Vere, Countess of he Twelfth Earl of Oxford and her Bool (Book Section)
Title: "Parchment and Pure Flesh"; Elizabeth de Vere, Countess of he Twelfth Earl of Oxford and her Bool
Author: Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
Editor: Jenny Adams and Nancy Mason Bradbury
Abstract: Gives the first detailed study of a large French-language manuscript volume of collected texts owned by an English countess known previously as the addressee of a C15th English-language poem and as a member of a family owning the Ellesmre manuscript of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and shows how such collections may have functioned in the lives of their owners.
Year: 2017
Access Model: print and ebook
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Book Title: Medieval Women and theri Objects
ISBN: 9780472122394

Recovery and Loss: Women's Writing Around Marie de France (Book Section)
Title: Recovery and Loss: Women's Writing Around Marie de France
Author: Ian Short
Author: Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
Abstract: Looks at canon-formation from the C18th on and the desire to amass a corpus of works for women authors: considers the conditions of contemporary medieval literary culture and the linguistic traits of the four poems now associated with Marie de France to argue that there are at least three, probably four women writing the works now ascribed to Marie de France: argues for less fetishising of this fiigure and more attention to the other women writers and patronesses of C12th-13th England and the literary culture of the period.
Year: 2020
Access Model: Printed book may become e-book
Publisher: D.S. Brewer, Cambridge
Book Title: Women Intellectuals and Leaders in the Middle Ages
ISBN: 9781843845553

"Cherchant toute Egypte pour les bon homes": Philippa de Vere (1367-14111) and her Book (Book Section)
Title: "Cherchant toute Egypte pour les bon homes": Philippa de Vere (1367-14111) and her Book
Author: Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
Editor: Gwilym Dodd, Helen Lacey and Anthony Musson
Abstract: The first study of the contents of Philippa de Vere's undiscussed manuscript and its context in her life: argues that romance and religious reading are not necessarily separate discourses; considers the attractions of Desert Father collections for women readers and looks at the poetics of empire in such works and in Christian versions of the Buddha's life (unknown as such) found in this (and other) manuscripts, to argue that French remains the language of empire for Edward III and the women members of his court.
Year: 2021
Access Model: print, paperback and e-book
Publisher: Routledge
Book Title: People, Power and Identity in the Late Middle Ages
ISBN: 9780367859978

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