Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations and Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- General Introduction: What's in a Name: the ‘French’ of ‘England’
- Section I Language and Socio-Linguistics
- Section II Crossing the Conquest: New Linguistic and Literary Histories
- Section III After Lateran IV: Francophone Devotions and Histories
- Introduction
- ‘Cest livre liseez … chescun jour’: Women and Reading c.1230–c.1430
- 19 French Devotional Texts in Thirteenth-Century Preachers' Anthologies
- 20 Augustinian Canons and their Insular French Books in Medieval England: Towards An Assessment
- 21 Eschuer peché, embracer bountee: Social Thought and Pastoral Instruction in Nicole Bozon
- 22 The Cultural Context of the French Prose remaniement of the Life of Edward the Confessor by a Nun of Barking Abbey
- 23 The Vitality of Anglo-Norman in Late Medieval England: The Case of the Prose Brut Chronicle
- 24 France in England: Anglo-French Culture in the Reign of Edward III
- 25 Lollardy: The Anglo-Norman Heresy?
- 26 The Languages of Memory: The Crabhouse Nunnery Manuscript
- Section IV England and French in the late Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries
- Bibliography
- Index of Primary Texts and Manuscripts
- Index of Primary Authors
- General Index: Persons and Places, Subjects
- YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS: PUBLICATIONS
25 - Lollardy: The Anglo-Norman Heresy?
from Section III - After Lateran IV: Francophone Devotions and Histories
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations and Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- General Introduction: What's in a Name: the ‘French’ of ‘England’
- Section I Language and Socio-Linguistics
- Section II Crossing the Conquest: New Linguistic and Literary Histories
- Section III After Lateran IV: Francophone Devotions and Histories
- Introduction
- ‘Cest livre liseez … chescun jour’: Women and Reading c.1230–c.1430
- 19 French Devotional Texts in Thirteenth-Century Preachers' Anthologies
- 20 Augustinian Canons and their Insular French Books in Medieval England: Towards An Assessment
- 21 Eschuer peché, embracer bountee: Social Thought and Pastoral Instruction in Nicole Bozon
- 22 The Cultural Context of the French Prose remaniement of the Life of Edward the Confessor by a Nun of Barking Abbey
- 23 The Vitality of Anglo-Norman in Late Medieval England: The Case of the Prose Brut Chronicle
- 24 France in England: Anglo-French Culture in the Reign of Edward III
- 25 Lollardy: The Anglo-Norman Heresy?
- 26 The Languages of Memory: The Crabhouse Nunnery Manuscript
- Section IV England and French in the late Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries
- Bibliography
- Index of Primary Texts and Manuscripts
- Index of Primary Authors
- General Index: Persons and Places, Subjects
- YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS: PUBLICATIONS
Summary
Anglo-Norman and the ‘Common Tongue’
My title, a play on the title of a famous article by Anne Hudson, is supposed to produce a frisson of donnish surprise, ideally accompanied by other affects, ranging from a shocked ‘What in heaven?’ to the curious ‘My goodness, how interesting’, all the way to the weary ‘Here we go again’. On the one hand, the title may seem opportunistic in its attempt to link Anglo-Norman to a heresy that, particularly over the last decade, has represented the dernier cri in late medieval scholarly fashion. On the other, the title's insistence on positing a link between a movement whose demotic radicalism is implied by the word ‘lollard’ itself and a language that, until recently, was widely associated with social and religious conservatism may make the title seem merely unbelievable. Admittedly, as the evidence this volume amasses for the vigour of Anglo-Norman into the fourteenth century and beyond attests, it is becoming steadily less workable to speak of the late fourteenth century (the period in which Lollardy, with its forceful ideas about the use of the English vernacular, came to the fore in England) using the well-worn language of ‘the triumph of English’, a phrase that still smacks of the old topos of the ‘Norman Yoke’. But our deepest scholarly narratives – and ‘the triumph of English’ is a deep narrative indeed – do not live by evidence alone. Core national, religious and literary historical beliefs are bound up in their survival. If they die at all, they die slow and die hard.
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- Information
- Language and Culture in Medieval BritainThe French of England, c.1100–c.1500, pp. 334 - 346Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009