Patois of the Parishes

Abstract This essay examines the birth of French medieval studies in America as a product of the racial anxiety and cultural-linguistic precarity experienced by Creoles. It argues that the idea of the French Middle Ages in North America, the conceptual matrix through which it became thinkable and desirable as a coherent subject of study, was made possible through engagements with minoritized Francophones who were assumed to embody the deep past. Part 1 examines how scholars in France’s Second Empire became invested in patois as a marker of “primitive” French cultural expression thought to have been transmitted over hundreds of years by oral recitation. Part 2 turns to a specific instantiation of French scholars’ pursuit of dialect: collectors of creole stories and grammars in the Caribbean, Indian Ocean, and south Louisiana who analogized creole utterances to the first French vernaculars as they emerged from Latin. Part 3 focuses on the pursuit of creolité as evidence of medievality in south Louisiana, and considers the racial anxiety evident in local deployments of the term creole. It concludes by discussing historical methods informed by creolization and mixed temporalities, and by imagining how these methods might transform medieval studies.