Post Conquest translators and their work

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This project brings into focus the pioneering authors - including women - writing in French for the very first time in medieval Britain after the Norman Conquest. How could such an immense break from the dominant written language, Latin, be explained and defended? My research examines an understudied set of saints' lives, the most prolific genre in the period, to explore what these writers tell us about their own work. The striking self-consciousness of these texts begs the question: what if they were not only telling the stories of the extraordinary lives of saints but also of their own unprecedented literary production?The flourishing of Anglo-Norman, the dialect of French spoken and written in Britain after the Norman Conquest, in the 12th and 13th centuries was founded on the translation of Latin texts into the vernacular. This was a process encouraged by the Angevin court under Henry II, conceptualised as a movement of knowledge from antiquity to medieval Britain, and designed to consolidate royal power through the durability of the written word. This self- perceived need for intellectual, social and political justification expressed itself acutely in the vernacular literature of the period. The aim of my project is to examine how Anglo-Norman authors were uniquely and prematurely conscious of the function of the written text as a transmitter of knowledge in a fixed and verifiable form. In a period where written documentation was becoming progressively more important (M.T Clanchy, 1993), and where texts were moving out of the monasteries to which they had previously been confined, manuscripts were becoming increasingly a part of both religious and lay spheres. I will seek to demonstrate that through the work of authors and scribes, Anglo-Norman translation was a project conscious of its own need for legitimation in the written text.Nowhere can this consciousness be seen more clearly than in Anglo-Norman saints' lives: their production coincided with the practice of translatio developing in this cultural and geographic sphere, and their key function consisted of making edifying Latin texts available to a lay public through the use of the vernacular. This culturally determined concern with the transmission of knowledge enabled by translation meant that saints were particularly useful to the project of self-legitimation, as mediums through which insular authors could negotiate their relationship to textual authority. My corpus would consist of Anglo-Norman saints' lives (around 30 texts), an understudied but integral part of medieval French literature. Researching this topic beside 12th century historiography, particularly Geoffroy Gaimar, Wace and Benoit de Sainte-Maure, would be highly productive, as it developed in the same period beside hagiography, and both textual corpora, by virtue of their context of production and historical interests, are inseparable.Drawing on the literary perspectives of Françoise Laurent and Emma Campbell alongside the more philological approach of Anglo-Norman scholars such as Delbert Russell, I will examine the ways in which the translation of Latin into the vernacular involved specific literary techniques with the aim of amplifying the translator's authority: drawing attention to a Latinate source (not always the translator's own), repeated claims for faithful translation, historical accuracy and direct experience of events in saints' lives, the early development of the topos of the lost manuscript book rediscovered or given to the hagiographer by a religious superior, intertextual references to vernacular insular literary production, and translators naming themselves and associating their role as translators with the project of learning and memorialisation instilled by their works.