French Lessons in Late-Medieval England: The “Liber donati” and “Commune parlance.”

While sick with Covid for the first time in April of 2022, I tried a popular language-learning application that has a large, green, threatening owl for its mascot. I was continuing my pandemic project of starting a new language, Indonesian. The raptor bird and its crew of quirky humans were doing their job. Through auditory and visual reinforcement, I learned some of the basic words and phrases that would not have stuck otherwise: greetings, food, clothing items, directions, etc. Yet many of the sentences were far from strictly practical. The cartoon owl and its companions teach “Saya bahagia makan laba-laba” (“I am happy eating spiders”) to beginners, and “Keburukan seseorang tidak perlu diketahui semua orang” (“Someone's ugliness does not need to be known by everyone”) at a more advanced level. However much mocked on the Internet memes that juxtapose actual speakers of a language with those who learned it through an application, vivid and outlandish examples have been a longstanding part of language acquisition pedagogy. Memory, as Mary Carruthers has argued in her Book of Memory (2008), seizes on intense images that appeal to the senses, often involving violence and sex.Brimming with startling, memorable phrases, French Lessons in Late-Medieval England presents a pair of fifteenth-century texts designed to instruct French to speakers of English. They are the Liber donati (henceforth LD) containing grammatical lessons in Latin and Middle French as well as dialogues, and Le Commune parlance (CP) featuring a series of dialogues on diverse topics. Along with his edition and English translation of the originals (both of which I quote in this review), Rory Critten includes a considerable introduction with plentiful and scrupulous footnotes; a list of additional readings; a commentary with endnotes; textual notes; and a bibliography. The editor-translator keeps manuscript readings wherever possible in order not to impose standard forms of French on potential regional variations (pp. 2, 170; see also his discussion of the demonstratives and personal pronouns in Middle French on p. 118). Anglo-Norman does not appear as a provincial outlier since medieval French in general has not been standardized, and therefore possesses a grammaire floue or “fuzzy grammar” in Claude Buridant's formulation (p. 5). Throughout the paratexts, Critten pays attention to the issues of gender, rank, and migration status of the users of the manuals and characters depicted therein (for instance, on p. 134; p. 152, n. 167; and p. 156). One of the crucial insights from the introduction has to do with rank, language use, (pre)national identities, and our present-day assumptions concerning them: “The realization that some non-noble English people possessed very good written and spoken French as late as the fifteenth century disrupts traditional language histories, which try to map the development of French and English onto the fortunes of France and England on the battlefields of the Hundred Years War” (p. 12).Many of the preoccupations of LD and CP parallel those of the fabliaux: material objects, food, sex, and their monetary value. Not surprisingly, CP 4.7 “Evening at the inn; a story” embeds an actual fabliau, analogous to Decameron VII.7, to which the lady to whom it is told responds negatively but tactfully. Critten points out that this is an important skill to develop for a language learner (p. 154, n. 173). In LD 4 “Securing lodging; provisions for horses,” the readers learn that four pennies is a favorable price–bon merché–for a bushel of oats (p. 48). When the draper's apprentice goes to Paris to sell the merchandise in CP 7 “The draper and his apprentice,” we witness a scene of energetic bargaining. The price of a roll of cloth goes from two thousand to fifteen hundred to twelve hundred franks (pp. 88–89). The woman running a hostel offers the customer in LD 5 “A conversation with the lady of the house” various commodities: game birds, pork, fruit, “formage [gloss: chese] et noez . . . puis dez ovys, un bon candelle et a vostre lit un beal damyselle” (cheese and nuts and then eggs, a good candle, and a beautiful young girl in your bed!) (pp. 50–51). Services of a sex worker fit unremarkably into the larger menu.Further in line with fabliaux matters, the vocabulary for private parts, though only male, appear in an extensive anatomical list to be learned from LD 10 “A would-be apprentice's French,” “le penyle et la peal dehors que covere le vit, lez coillons, le cul” (the penis and the foreskin that covers the prick, the balls, the arsehole) (pp. 56–57), and from CP 2 “The human body,” “le penyl [gloss: share], le vit, lez cuilons [gloss: ballat], le cul [gloss: ars] . . . lez nagez [gloss: buttockes]” (the pubes, the cock, the balls, the arse . . . the buttocks) (pp. 60–61). Unattested anywhere else, ballat is perhaps a form of the more common Middle English ballok (p. 146, n. 138). Here, I must praise Critten for his scrupulous attention to the lower stylistic registers while Englishing the text. His note about deciding to render ribaud and paillard as “fucker” and “scumbag” respectively is exemplary (p. 142, n. 124). In another note, he explains why his translation of the phrase “se sourdre le cul” as “get off [one's] arse” is more fitting than the one offered by the Anglo-Norman Dictionary, “to bestir oneself” (p. 162, n. 212).Readers can learn how to insult using such terms, which is a powerful way to deploy a new language. On the other hand, many dialogues provide a selection of courteous expressions: LD 1 “Salutations”; LD 5 “A conversation with the lady of the house”; CP 10 “Different greetings; news from Orleans”; CP 16 “Asking for lodging; giving a message”; CP 19 “Different greetings according to the time of day.” Those interested in pragmatics, the branch of linguistics that deals with how speakers communicate in social settings, will find much to study and appreciate. One of my favorite scenes follows an intense verbal and physical fight between two men sharing a bed in a hostel in CP 13: “senglant merdous garcion, villain mastin, meschiant paillard” (you bloody, shitty boy, mean dog, evil scumbag) (pp. 96–97). To diffuse the tension, they switch the topic of conversation to small dogs that live at the hostel. “Ou est Briket, le petit chien, et Floret, le petit chien?” (Where is Briket, the little dog, and Floret, the little dog?) asks one, and the other answers, “Je ne sçai mie ou Briket est devenu, mais toutzvois Floret s'en est couché aval ov les autres chiens qui gisont en le gardein” (I have no idea what's become of Briket, but Floret is in any case sleeping downstairs with the other dogs who are lying in the garden) (pp. 96–97). Bringing up small, lovable animals, still today is a commonly effective strategy for calming the passions after an altercation. Scholars in the discipline of Animal Studies might find this passage interesting and read it alongside depictions of dogs in other medieval literature.Humor characterizes many sections of the texts, which helps with language acquisition now and then. Present-day Duolingo content providers like to employ spiders in their examples to teach several languages. The practical can turn into the outlandish or fanciful in the medieval dialogues, too. “The good-bye meal” in the Commune Parlance consists of a dizzying variety of creatures, featuring the usual aristocratic fare like the red meat and wild fowl, but ending with a caveat against eating “lez oseux ravenous . . . com agas . . . salamandrez, hulotz, vel: huetz, soris chaux, escoufles . . . et esgles” (the birds of prey . . . such as magpies . . . lizards, owls, bats, kites . . . and eagles) (CP 4.2, p. 66–67). (Translating “salamandrez” more closely as “salamanders”–fabled reptiles living in fire–would make the catalog even stranger.) In CP 20, a well-wisher tells the story of Job to an ill man whose injuries are graphically described and exaggerated (p. 165, n. 232). He lists the animals belonging to the Old Testament character that God destroyed, moving from various domestic and wild animals to “cinges, marmesetz, unicornes, olifantz, dromadairs, lipars, lions, et lionesses” (monkeys, marmosets, unicorns, elephants, dromedaries, leopards, lions, and lionesses) (pp. 106–107). A French learner from medieval England ought to know how to say “unicorn” or “leopard”; a person acquiring another language need not be limited to the here and now.In conclusion, Critten's French Lessons in Late Medieval England is a smart, well-researched, and approachable work that I would recommend to a wide audience of individuals interested in foreign-language acquisition, sociolinguistic and pragmatic histories of French and English, everyday life in medieval France and England (food, clothing, hostelry management, horse care, gossip), performance, or simply the art of courteous, uproarious, and often contentious conversation. I can envision many creative uses of these remarkable materials. A professor of medieval French could select some dialogues for language practice of their students, or a historical novelist might turn to the book to find authentic medieval horse and dog names, Middle French and Middle English terms for genitals, possible prices for rolls of cloth in fifteenth-century Paris, edible and inedible woodland creatures, and so much more.