Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

During the Middle Ages, literature was routinely translated and adapted from one language into another, and the surviving corpus of Middle English texts reflects that process particularly clearly. As the previous chapter has discussed, after the Norman Conquest, English was relegated to the lowest status of the three languages of England, with French replacing it as the language of high culture, the aristocracy and government, and Latin extending its dominance both within the Church and as a language of record. The tradition of poetic composition in Old English, which had produced works of the stature of the secular epic Beowulf and the religious Dream of the Rood, was almost completely disrupted by the Norman colonization, and English literary writing had effectively to be reinvented. The most significant literature produced in post-Conquest England was at first composed in Anglo-Norman, the insular variant of continental French that diverged from its parent language ever further over the ensuing centuries. For much of the twelfth century Anglo-Norman texts were in the very forefront of vernacular composition in Western Europe, and constituted some of the earliest and the most famous works of ‘French’ literature. Anglo-Norman, however, increasingly became a language that had to be learned at every social level below the royal court; and the understanding of Latin remained almost ... log in or subscribe to read full text