| Popis: |
This chapter discusses Peter Langtoft’s French-language epic chronicle of British history (c. 1307 and disseminated mainly in north-eastern England), and its most luxurious surviving manuscript: London, BL, Royal MS 20 A II. This early fourteenth-century manuscript contained other historical, lyric, and prophetic material in French and English; in the second half of the same century, abridged segments of the Lancelot en prose and Queste del Saint Graal were appended, along with a letter about recent events in the eastern Mediterranean. We ask: how does a historical text produce itself, how does it authorize itself, and what are the roles of language and of discourse? We show how the Arthurian prose romance extracts in French adapt the manuscript’s earlier contents to England’s changing political and cultural concerns. The use of a single language—French—enhances and directs the potential for meaningful conflict within and beyond the language community. |
