The Values of French examined the nature and value of the use of French in Europe during a crucial period, 1100-1450, less in terms of its cultural prestige (the traditional focus of scholarship) than of its role as a supralocal, transnational language, particularly in Western Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean. The project fostered collaboration between, and cuts across, different intellectual and national scholarly traditions, drawing on expertise in codicology, critical theory, linguistics, literature, and philology; it involved scholars from a range of European countries and North America, entailing empirical research around a complex and widely disseminated textual tradition vital to medieval understandings of European history and identity, 'L’Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César'. This case study grounded and stimulated broader speculative reflection on two questions concerning linguistic identity. What is the relation historically between language and identity in Europe? How are cognate languages demarcated from each other? Indeed, its final aim, through and beyond its consideration of French as a lingua franca, was to interrogate that language’s role in the emergence of a European identity in the Middle Ages.
The projects specific objectives were as follows:
1. To develop a better understanding of the values of the use of French as a transnational and supralocal language in the Middle Ages (1100-1450).
2. To investigate the role that French played in the emergence of a European, transnational and supralocal identity (as opposed to a specific French national identity) at a crucial point in history (i.e. 1100-1450).
3. To conduct empirical research on a sizeable body of under-researched material that is central to the writing of European history in the Middle Ages (the Histoire ancienne jusqu'à César), in order to make this material available digitally.
4. To engage in more speculative, theoretical, and genuinely interdisciplinary enquiry about the contours of individual languages and linguistic definition, using medieval French as a case study.
5. To engage in more speculative, theoretical, and genuinely interdisciplinary enquiry about the nature of the ‘literary’ and its relation to the conception and practice of historical writing.
6. To promote significant (and largely unprecedented) interdisciplinary and international collaboration between philology, literary studies and linguistics.
There were therefore 4 interlocking seams in the project, which may be characterised as follows:
1. Editorial
2. Linguistic
3. History vs literature
4. Language and identity
