Post Conquest translators and their work

这个项目聚焦于诺曼征服后中世纪英国首次用法语写作的先锋作家——包括女性作家。如何解释和捍卫这种与占主导地位的书面语言拉丁语的巨大分离呢？我的研究考察了一组未被充分研究的圣徒的生活，这是那个时期最多产的体裁，以探索这些作家告诉我们他们自己的作品。这些文本中引人注目的自我意识回避了一个问题：如果它们不仅讲述了圣人非凡的生活故事，而且还讲述了他们自己前所未有的文学作品呢？盎格鲁-诺曼语是诺曼征服后在英国使用和书写的法语方言，在12世纪和13世纪的繁荣是建立在将拉丁文本翻译成方言的基础上的。亨利二世（Henry II）治下的安热王朝（Angevin court）鼓励这一进程，将其定义为一场从古代到中世纪英国的知识运动，旨在通过文字的持久性巩固王权。这种对智力、社会和政治辩护的自我认知需要在这一时期的白话文学中表现得淋漓尽致。我项目的目的是研究盎格鲁-诺曼作家是如何独特而过早地意识到书面文本作为一种固定的、可验证的形式的知识传递者的功能的。在一个书面文件变得越来越重要的时期（m.t. Clanchy, 1993），当文本走出它们以前被限制的修道院时，手稿正日益成为宗教和世俗领域的一部分。我将试图证明，通过作者和抄写员的工作，盎格鲁-诺曼翻译是一个意识到自己需要在书面文本中合法化的项目。这种意识在盎格鲁-诺曼圣徒的生活中表现得最为明显：他们的产生与这种文化和地理领域中翻译的发展相吻合，他们的主要功能是通过使用白话，向外行提供有教育意义的拉丁文本。这种文化决定了对知识传播的关注，使得翻译成为可能，这意味着圣徒对于自我合法化的项目特别有用，作为媒介，孤立的作者可以通过它来谈判他们与文本权威的关系。我的语料库将包括盎格鲁-诺曼圣徒的生活（大约30篇文章），这是中世纪法国文学的一个未被充分研究但不可或缺的部分。与12世纪的史学，特别是Geoffroy Gaimar， Wace和Benoit de Sainte-Maure一起研究这个话题，将是非常富有成效的，因为它在同一时期与圣徒传记一起发展，并且由于它们的生产背景和历史利益，这两个文本语料库是不可分割的。借鉴francaloise Laurent和Emma Campbell的文学观点，以及Delbert Russell等盎格鲁-诺曼学者的语言学方法，我将研究将拉丁语翻译成白话涉及特定文学技巧的方式，目的是扩大译者的权威：将人们的注意力吸引到拉丁语来源（并不总是译者自己的），反复声称忠实的翻译，历史的准确性和圣徒生活中事件的直接经历，失传手稿的早期主题的发展，或由宗教领袖重新发现或交给圣徒传记作者，对方言岛屿文学作品的互文参考，译者给自己命名，并把他们作为译者的角色与他们的作品所灌输的学习和记忆项目联系起来。

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.