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Showing posts from July, 2019

The Anglo-Norman Prose 'Brut' Tradition

The Anglo-Norman Prose Brut Tradition [A guest blog post by Dr. Trevor Russell Smith, who visited the Anglo-Norman Dictionary project in 2018 and 2019 through a AHRC bursary]  Latin was the standard language in which one wrote historical literature in England through the fifteenth century, although chronicles, annals, histories, and poems on contemporary and past events were sometimes written in the vernacular. The fourteenth century is commonly seen as the point in which the vernacular of choice shifted from Anglo-Norman French to Middle English. While the latter has received a huge amount of attention over the past few centuries, in no small part due to nationalism and it being more justifiably studied in the classroom, Anglo Norman has been neglected. This is immediately evident when one seeks to examine the historical literature written in the fourteenth century, this supposed transitional period. Gransden, in her widely used reference work, discusses many Latin texts