“Medieval French without Borders”
40th Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval Studies, Fordham University
March 20-21, 2021
This digital 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. Talks are available as online videos, which can be watched at any time before the conference. The conference weekend will be dedicated to the plenary lectures and discussion of the pre-circulated videos.
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)
Program and online registration can be found here:
https://mvstconference.ace.fordham.edu/medievalfrenchwithoutborders/conference-program/
