This conference addresses the multilingual contact zones and social, cultural and literary contexts of exchange in which French featured between the ninth and the sixteenth centuries. A second language of several empires, a tongue of invaders, and an idiom spread by merchants, sailors, artisans, and pilgrims, French was a medium of both border-construction and border-crossing. The program includes papers on the dynamic relations between French and other languages including Arabic, Castilian, Dutch, English, German, Greek, Hebrew, Irish, Italian, Latin, Norse, Occitan, and Welsh. Such relations often exceed traditional explanatory frameworks of cultural prestige and the nation.
Plenary Lecturers: Wolfgang Haubrichs (Universität des Saarlandes) and Teresa Shawcross (Princeton University)
Round Table Panelists: Thelma Fenster (Fordham University), Karla Mallette (University of Michigan), Anne-Hélène Miller (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), Sara Poor (Princeton University), Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Fordham University)
The conference will consist of concurrent panels, webinars, and a roundtable on March 20 and March 21, 2021, all conducted via Zoom. Registered participants have access in a secure google folder to a two-page précis and prerecorded versions of the talks in each concurrent session, so that the 40-minute slots given for each session during the conference will be reserved for discussions of the papers in the sessions. The plenary speakers and roundtable participants will deliver their remarks in real time. Zoom invitations for every session will be sent to registered participants at the email addresses they provide in the days before the conference.
Registration is free but necessary to gain access to the talks and receive a zoom invitation. Registration link: https://forms.gle/HfY4eo8jisQ5a7pN8
See the conference program at: https://mvstconference.ace.fordham.edu/medievalfrenchwithoutborders/conference-program/