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[email protected] www.lesenluminures.com Flowering of Medieval French Literature Tel: (212) 717 7273 Fax: (212) 717 7278 | 7 th Floor, Penthouse New York, NY 10021 catalogue 18 23 East 73 rd Street | LES ENLUMINURES LTD. “Au parler que m’aprist ma mere” couv 16 BOH - vernaculaire - couv SIMONE_2014 05/03/14 11.30 Pagina 1 Flowering of Medieval French Literature “Au parler que m’aprist ma mere” Sandra Hindman Ariane Bergeron-Foote couv 16 BOH - vernaculaire - couv SIMONE_2014 05/03/14 11.30 Pagina 2 Flowering of Medieval French Literature “Au parler que m’aprist ma mere” Sandra Hindman Ariane Bergeron-Foote Catalogue 18 EXHIBITION: 2-26 APRIL 2014 LES ENLUMINURES LTD. 23 East 73 rd Street 7 th Floor, Penthouse New York, NY 10021 Flowering of Medieval French Literature “Au parler que m’aprist ma mere” Tel: (212) 717 7273
[email protected] 13-20 MAY 2014 LES ENLUMINURES 1, rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau Sandra Hindman Ariane Bergeron-Foote 75001 Paris Tel: (33) 01 42 60 15 58
[email protected] www.lesenluminures.com © SANDRA HINDMAN 2014 ISBN 978-0-9915172-0-6 PAUL HOLBERTON PUBLISHING, 89 BOROUGH HIGH STREET, LONDON SE1 1NL WWW.PAUL-HOLBERTON.NET FOR LES ENLUMINURES • PARIS • CHICAGO • NEW YORK “Speaking in my mother tongue” Au parler que m’aprist ma mere Jean de Meun, who with Guillaume de Lorris wrote the Roman de la Rose, the very bedrock of medieval French literature, described written French in his late thirteenth-century prologue to Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy as “the speech my mother taught me when I took milk from her breasts” (Au parler que m’aprist ma mere / A Meun, quant je l’alaitoie”). We might say now “speaking in my mother tongue.” Although the earliest records of written French date from the ninth century, it was not until the thirteenth century that French became widespread as a written language. Even then, for writers such as Dante, Latin remained the sovereign of the vernacular (“sovrano del volgare,” Convivo 1:7). Many early references to written French refer to it, like Jean de Meun did, as the “langue nutritive,” relying on the dual meaning of nourrir, to be like mother’s milk and mother’s speech (Cerquiglini-Toulet, 2011). In his prologue, Jean de Meun was actually distinguishing his French dialect (“rough, uncouth, and barbarous,” for which he apologized) from what became known as Parisian French or the “langue du roi” of which there was “no speech more subtle.” Many factors influenced the shift from Latin to the “mother tongue.” The change from an agrarian economy based on the land to a commercial economy in the towns and cities imposed a need for the middle classes to understand each other in written as well as oral forms. Th