THE EARLY THIRTEENTH-CENTURY Waldef is the least known of the French-language romances of England. Pioneering attention from Rosalind Field has drawn attention to Waldef as a major work in the “matter of England” and as a great intertextual work at the heart of the insular romance corpus, catching up many themes from earlier romance and historiography in its allusions and going on in turn to influence subsequent romances. Work by Judith Weiss has explored Waldef's engagement with empire, with East Anglia and the sea and other aspects of its thematic riches and its complex relation to romance convention and historical circumstance. The extant manuscript of the French text continued to attract readers’ inscriptions in its margins into the later Middle Ages and Waldef was twice translated into Latin in the fifteenth century. Yet the enduring medieval interest in this text has not attracted proportionate interest from modern scholars of insular romance.

The FRETS (French of England Translation) series—previously published by Arizona Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and now published as part of ARC Humanities Press's Foundations series, recognises both the cultural vitality of translation as a form of medieval literary activity and the significance of modern translations of medieval texts as the driver of new literary study and exploration. As editors of the series we have long felt that the chief reason for the under-recognition of Waldef is its lack of a modern English translation. At 22,000 lines, the romance has been a formidable project for any individual to take on. But here, at last, much dedicated collaborative work by Ivana Djordjević and Nicole Clifton together with a doyenne of translations from insular French, Judith Weiss, has enabled FRETS to offer a remedy for inattention to Waldef in the form of a full translation.

We thank Anna Henderson, our publisher at ARC Humanities Press, and her production team for identifying the provision of this substantial text as fitting ARC's mission to make a wider range of medieval texts accessible. We are delighted to offer a volume that will enable scholars and students readier access to Waldef and very grateful to our translators for their selfless hours of labour.

Christine de Pizan (c. 1364–c. 1430) led a life of learning and engagement, stimulated by her reading and intellectual gifts. She produced an astonishingly large and varied body of work, covering politics, philosophy, government, ethics, the conduct of war, autobiography and biography, and religious, homiletic, and consolatory subjects. The times she lived in were calamitous, especially after the death of the French king Charles V in 1380: power struggles between King Charles VI's uncles, shifting loyalties, betrayal, murder, bouts of plague, war with England – all would have tested the hardiest among the French. Widowed in 1390 at the age of twenty-five, Christine spent fourteen years in court protecting her property from the predations of those who sought to cheat her, all the while lamenting the death of her beloved husband, the royal secretary Etienne de Castel. In spite of this, she was uniquely fortunate to have had an educated father, Tommaso da Pizzano, who, in being invited to France to be Charles V's astrologer, brought her to the court of that enlightened medieval French monarch when she was a small child. The happy coincidence of her father's openness to his daughter's scholarly interests (as she tells us in the Cité des dames) and the intellectual fertility of the royal court created the ground for her to follow what she saw, in the philosophical language of the time, as her God-given “inclination” to study. Proximity to the French humanists of the king's chancellery and her marriage to Etienne furthered her opportunities to acquire both knowledge and literary skill, and she felt she had become a man by profession, a writer supporting herself and her family.

Christine did most of her writing in the space of a little over a decade, starting in 1399. By any standards, she was extremely energetic, prolific, and quick.

The phrase ‘French of England’, as Jocelyn Wogan-Browne has defined it, encompasses medieval England's francophony as it shaped a range of literary, social, political and commercial practices for nearly four hundred years, from the eleventh through the early fifteenth centuries. It links what seem at first to be incompatible terms – the French language, on the one hand, and England on the other. It invites scholars to embrace medieval England's plurilingualism and it beckons toward an exceptional and exceptionally well-documented instance of the flow and mix of several languages in multilingual cultures. The term implies the dynamism of linguistic movement and exchange that characterized medieval England, and in so doing it hints at the riches of a complex situation that the term ‘Anglo-Norman’ is not thought to evoke. Moreover, the conventional division between Anglo-Norman, deemed to cover the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and ‘Anglo-French’, denoting the later medieval period, implies interruption where there was in fact continuity. The French language in England effloresced and then faded in some places and among some groups, only to appear and adapt itself among other groups and at other times. In short, a revised way of framing the question called for a new title.

The arrival of the French language did not suddenly bring multilingualism to the British Isles, already the home of a mix of Celtic, Germanic and Scandinavian vernaculars as well as of Latin. The ‘French of England’ asks us to understand medieval England's multilingualism not simply as the cohabitation in one geographical area of, say, three separate and contained languages but, rather, as a process, a set of unselfconscious interactions between speech acts or writing moments that used the resources offered by at least three languages: Latin, French and English. It was a diffuse, variable, dynamic phenomenon best envisaged not in a fixed linguistic or cultural configuration or existing in a rigidly circumscribed geography but as a process, its circulation an agent of expression and communication between individuals and groups.

Among the nearly 1,000 items in French that survive from medieval England's four hundred years of francophone culture, as listed in Dean and Boulton's indispensable Anglo-Norman Literature, are numerous manuscripts commissioned by aristocratic English women for whom French had become a language of culture and learning. Such women, some of whom may well have controlled budgets of their own, benefitted from the increasing wealth of the English aristocracy and the availability of a shared, privileged vernacular language. They bore responsibility for the moral and religious education of their children and of other family and household members, and they had the means to commission devotional and biblical material. Often, such women could personalize their religious reading by participating in the decision process, consulting with their clerics, scribes and illustrators about a book's contents, order of selections and the kinds and numbers of illustrations, perhaps with the intention of making them suitable for the instruction of a range of adults and children. As the patrons of frequently luxurious and expensively produced books, women helped to advance the well-documented ‘laicization’ of religious literature in medieval England, in large part the result of an environment notable for the very close and porous links between the high-ranking laity and the clergy (so much so that, as Sara Lipton observes studying the Bible moralisee, divisions between lay and clerical become ‘inadequate categories of investigation’). Modern scholars, prominent among them Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, have done a great deal to locate, describe and interpret English women's intellectual contributions, especially to manuscript culture. That work, along with Wogan-Browne's extensive investigations into England's long French-language moment, have altered our conceptual map of medieval England's literary practices.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries especially, the Church wished to strengthen and define itself anew and to reach out more broadly to laypeople (as codified, for example, in various canons of the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215). In the same period, enmity toward the Jews also increased, reaching a zenith (but not an end) in the 1290 Expulsion. Why this was so, and why the period beginning in the twelfth century in particular provided the soil upon which anti-Jewish feeling grew, has been the subject of numerous studies.

England and French

When, in the second eleventh-century conquest of England, William, duke of Normandy, led a coalition of Normans, Bretons, Flemings and other French speakers in the 1066 invasion, there was no question of his imposing a written French-language bureaucracy. The English court already included French among its languages, exchanges between clerics in England and in francophone areas of Europe had a long history and French-speaking landholders were present in England before the Norman Conquest. But William retained the governance of the country by shires and hundreds and his initial writs were sent out in English drafted by the staff of the king's chapel, with greetings to all the king's people ‘frencisce  englisce’ (sometimes also ‘englisce ge denisce’). In so far as William used a standard or ‘official’ language for establishing his rule, it rapidly became Latin: as Richard Sharpe argues, the most practical arrangement (in line with continental practice) was to have written Latin documents from which English and French (and Cornish, Irish, Welsh, and Gaelic, or, in continental domains, Norman, Breton and Flemish) translations could be given to differing groups of laypeople involved in government. Certainly, spoken French quickly consolidated its elite status after the Conquest from being one among several languages used in the eleventh-century Anglo-Danish and Anglo-Saxon courts to being the vernacular of England's rulers. But French had as yet no full existence as a written language (some isolated texts from the ninth to the eleventh century survive, but they are specific to particular, usually para-liturgical or other ritual occasions, rather than part of a systematic use of French as a written language of secular culture or record). In England the invaders encountered a different distribution of written and spoken language as between Latin and the vernaculars than in their home culture. Late Old English standardised West Saxon functioned much more like Latin, in that it was a written language used across historiography, law, biblical translation, pastoral care, science, learning, medicine, travel and romance.

This volume presents single manuscript editions and translations of prologues, epilogues, and other excerpts from French-language texts composed or circulating in medieval England. The French-language writing of England offers an indispensable corpus for the history of French-language literature at large and for the understanding of England's literary, documentary and cultural history over some four hundred years and more. We concentrate here on literary and other texts in their most self-reflexive moments: identifying themselves, discussing their own production and strategies, interpellating their audiences, and positioning their materials. This focus provides access to the assumptions and strategies of medieval England's literary and literate corpus of work in French. Our volume is not a conventional literary history so much as an argued anthology making a case for the interest and significance of the field from which this book draws its demonstrations.

No anthology of whatever kind can include all the texts an editor or reader might wish to have. A handful of texts in the French of England have been well served in modern translations and discussion and are omitted here: others are fully translated and introduced in our French of England Translation Series (FRETS) and its occasional publication series (FRETS OPS): see https://acmrs.org/publications/catalog?field_mrts_tax_ tid=14. Nevertheless, by offering direct contact with edited texts and some mappings of French-language writing in England's regional and supra-regional cultures, we hope to have provided many reasons for others to make their own further explorations.

Contributors and Acknowledgements

The volume has been long in the making and has many debts. In the first instance, the editors want warmly to thank all those who have contributed entries. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Thelma Fenster, and Delbert Russell are ultimately responsible for the editions and commentary: we have each edited, introduced and cross-checked each other's entries, but we have also been delighted to work with colleagues and with our former and current graduate students. Dr Cathy Hume (Lecturer in English, University of Bristol, UK) originally prepared Part VI, §3, Middle English Versions of French Entries, and contributed the Lumere as lais (19) as a post-doctoral Modern Humanities Reseach Associate to Jocelyn Wogan-Browne at the University of York. Dr Joshua Byron Smith, Assistant Professor in English at the University of Arkansas kindly undertook to prepare (31), for which knowledge of Welsh was a desideratum. Dr John Spence, an expert in Anglo-Norman prose chronicle writing, contributed the Mohun Chronicle (42).