eBook

The Familiar Enemy

Butterfield, Ardis

2009,2010

Overview

The Familiar Enemy re‐examines the linguistic, literary, and cultural identities of England and France within the context of the Hundred Years War. During this war, two highly intertwined peoples developed complex strategies for expressing their aggressively intimate relationship. The special connection between the English and the French has endured into the modern period as a model for Western nationhood. This book reassesses the concept of ‘nation’ in this period through a wide‐ranging discussion of writing produced in war, truce or exile from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, concluding with reflections on the retrospective views of this time of war created by the trials of Jeanne d'Arc and by Shakespeare's Henry V. It considers works and authors writing in French, ‘Anglo‐Norman’, and in English, in England and on the continent, with attention to the tradition of comic Anglo‐French jargon (a kind of medieval franglais), to Machaut, Deschamps, Froissart, Chaucer, Gower, Charles d'Orléans and many lesser‐known or anonymous works. Chaucer traditionally has been seen as a quintessentially English author. This book argues that he needs to be resituated within the deeply francophone context, not only of England but the wider multilingual cultural geography of medieval Europe. It thus argues that a modern understanding of what ‘English’ might have meant in the fourteenth century cannot be separated from ‘French’, and that this has far‐reaching implications both for our understanding of English and the English, and of French and the French.

• Publisher: Oxford University Press,Oxford University Press, Incorporated
• Subject: Chaucer, Geoffrey / d. 1400 / English influences / English literature / France / French influences / French literature / Great Britain / History / History and criticism / Literary Studies (Early and Medieval) / Literary Studies (European) / Middle English, 1100-1500 / Nationalism and literature / To 1500
• ISBN: 0199574863, 9780199574865