I started learning French as my first secondary language, having never learned the language of my parents, Tagalog, at home. Like many immigrants of their generation who moved to the States, my parents believed in the primary importance of learning English well and didn’t have the time to teach us Tagalog. The culture and values of their homeland were, they believed, things that could be transmitted through English. The important thing was not learning Tagalog but instilling the importance of family and doing well for the sake of the sacrifices your parents made for you; this could be accomplished through other activities, such as visiting family or doing chores with a certain sense of obligation. They spoke Tagalog among themselves, with their friends and my relatives, and at fiestas, usually around food. My siblings and I ended up learning French, German, and Latin. Perhaps the energy to learn these ancient and European languages came from the drive to make up for something lost. Learning French made me slow down my thought processes. I had to translate everything and rethink how I presented myself as a person in English. I could escape what I believed was the embarrassing provincialism of my immigrant parents and their customs that I eventually learned to appreciate.

Later that experience of self-estrangement through French extended to my becoming a medievalist: I learned how to engage with languages and texts that were no longer tethered to a contemporary lived experience but were about a performance and medium of a text that had to be located and then reimagined in and through the archive for our current moment. Becoming a medievalist challenged me to think about subjectivity and to imagine literary texts in different modes—for example, as performance, as a rubric in a manuscript, or as an art object. I believe that it is in this spirit of slowing down that we must evaluate our institutional identity and purpose as French departments. We need to affirm our commitment to the value of learning and thinking in the language in and of itself. Every French-speaking person—including native speakers—has their own story about how they came to French and made it their own. By including those stories and infusing our scholarship with that kind of sensitivity, we contribute to the changing inheritance of French language and culture. My story includes that sense of estrangement from my cultural heritage, a coming to French as a result of that experience, and now the return to French via Old Occitan and medieval culture, as I study how precolonial Philippine lyric is embodied materially in gold objects and immaterially through the letters and sounds of troubadour lyrics. I have come full circle (or spiral) in a way; that’s my version of Frenchness.

In this essay, I will first reflect on how I view canonicity as a medievalist working in Old French and Old Occitan. Second, I will explore how the mediality of medieval studies can help us convey to our students the relevance of French literature today. Finally, I will synthesize my earlier points on French literary history and medieval studies to argue that scholars of different periods and methodologies can and ought to reinvest in a shared inheritance of global French.

I am aware that much of my thinking in this essay comes from having been immersed in the canonical French literary tradition and, in recent years, its contemporary critique and philosophical reflection. This genealogy includes figures as varied as Voltaire and Rousseau, Fanon and Mbembe. My undergraduate years saw the twilight of deconstruction, the fall of Paul de Man, a fading interest in those lectures that had seemed so important: Derrida, Foucault, Said. Then in grad school, I discovered adjacent texts and periods: the troubadours were never really French because, as a lyric tradition in Occitan, it took hold in the area of northern Italy where the lyrics were first transmitted in manuscripts. Troubadours taught me to see the French canon aslant, always in the process of finding new audiences, readers, makers. I learned that the troubadours did not belong to the French tradition in the same way as the Chanson de Roland or Chrétien de Troyes despite their decisive influence on European poetry. At a certain point, Occitan was extraneous to the idea of France as a nation born in the sixteenth century, and these provincial poets were relegated to the margins, and became—via medieval chansonniers compiled in Italy, and then Dante and Petrarch—much more a part of the Italian literary canon. When I first went to look at troubadour chansonniers in the National Library in Paris, I was astonished that the sixteenth-century spine read “provincial poets.” The poets who popularized the celebration of illicit love as a high art form and who were praised by Dante were deemed provincial compared to Ronsard and Du Bellay. From my experience learning Old Occitan and from this discovery of the troubadours’ ambiguous fate in relation to the French canon, I have learned to see “Frenchness” as a dynamic cultural and historical inheritance, influenced by philology, literary history, and national politics.

Whether French and Francophone studies becomes institutionally housed in a Romance languages department or world languages and literatures department, I still feel strongly that there should be professional degrees and expertise on medieval/premodern literature in French and its adjacent (Occitan) languages. As a medievalist working on troubadour poetry, I have always been acutely aware of the multilingual nature of present-day France, and that during the Middle Ages, an international idiom of courtly lyric in Occitan existed south of the Loire in what is now southern France, northern Spain, and northern Italy, and in crusader states interacting with other cultures (Muslim, Byzantine) and languages such as Arabic, Greek, and, of course, Latin, with their scholastic and religious traditions. It makes sense to study the troubadours and French-language Moroccan feminist literature in one department if we recognize the common inheritance of the history of French in literature and poetry: troubadour lyric influenced the French poetic tradition (as well as other vernacular traditions such as Italian) and was later relegated to being a minor provincial language after the standardization of the national French language and universal idea of a state in the Renaissance; Moroccan feminist literature grapples with the inheritance of a universal French tradition and now recreates a French tradition through a postcolonial feminist lens. Scholars who work on both of these types of literature might be surprised that they both see themselves as working on “colonial” Francophone literature, but their shared inheritance of French culture makes for productive critical inquiry. In both cases, the French tradition was transformed through particular poetic and cultural idioms. Troubadours invented a certain way to talk about love and desire that became an important social discourse, one in which you negotiated your status as a lover or a vassal or as a servant to God through a highly refined and sophisticated poetic idiom that was essentially musical in nature, words joined with sounds as the troubadours would say (moz e son). Likewise, Moroccan feminist literature can incorporate the local idiom of North Africa and the position of a Muslim or secular woman while being conscious of how the same language is used to espouse universalism or egalitarian Enlightenment. Such poetic social discourse and critique happens in and through a language that goes beyond semantics and information but requires a sensitivity to the long history of the French tradition. How ideas operate through French allows us to give voice at once at once to a troubadour (or trobairitz, a female troubadour) or Moroccan feminist.

“Fin’amor” is not just a troubadour concept about unrequited love but something embodied through a performance practice and within a community of initiates; a knowledge of its power and sustained presence in the Western literary tradition requires an awareness of the poetics that sustained it as a courtly ethic of self-improvement. Similarly modern French literature comes to life in various media and situations, and we ought to deploy methodologies that help us approach new media, epistemologies, and world views that are constantly changing how we see complexity and heterogeneity. The study of French literature illuminates a sustained historical dialogue in French and highlights the importance of language for the transmission of ideas across different cultures and peoples. Regarding spoken French, we are all witness to the rapid sociolinguistic changes happening in within and outside of the Hexagon. When I take the RER from Charles de Gaulle Airport to the center of Paris, hardly anyone speaks standard French or seems to be of a white European background. Yet I bet that most people on that train subscribe to some version of French identity and most can speak some version of French. It’s not just the national school system but a certain gravitas of the language, history, and traditions that this population has had to confront at some time in their lives or another even if the relationship might be ambivalent or critical (Ronsard for whom?). A focus on the ways language is changing rapidly both inside and outside institutional contexts will be essential in our future pursuits in the field.

Troubadour verse taught me not only how to understand texts as word and sound from a particular performative and historical situation but how to think today about how a community of speakers, readers, and performers keeps a language and literary tradition alive. We as scholars must invest in the language and traditions alive on that RER car as well as in the works of the troubadours and Ronsard by making these historical French texts relevant for new audiences. The study of the troubadours taught me to understand transgressive desire through the melody, rhythm, and words of a verse. It also taught me how poetry is shaped by the transmission of manuscripts or the collection of texts into chansonniers. How does the poetry and poetic traditions of these people in the metro—the poetry in their head and on their AirPods and the conversations at home in the kitchen with their family—relate to the French or Occitan of the past and the constantly evolving literary canon that we strive to make more inclusive? One way to draw connections between old and new forms of poetry is by understanding poetry as music, performance, and through new media. This approach might speak to people for whom “literature” constitutes more a living tradition of oral transmission, say the Koran recited on the radio or a tradition of hip-hop of a certain quartier in Marseille than by a Flaubert novel or Prévost’s Manon Lescaut.

French universalism often excludes others and manifests itself through a static French canon of the Enlightenment, the great realist novels, Proust and the madeleine. That is why we must do all we can to decenter and shape the canon and make it inclusive but also engage in the ongoing popular interest in Frenchness. Our students are eager for classes on Balzac and Hugo but are also curious to know about Francophone literature and how it intersects with Arabic literary traditions. We must not give up on the integrity of a field based on literature and philology; at the same time, we should do all we can to embrace new approaches that offer fresh perspectives on French literature and acknowledge the enduring power and influence of its ideas and language—its cultural capital. 

How to achieve the balance of an address to a wider public and to a specialized audience of scholars that can maintain the integrity of French studies? This is a challenge as we grapple more and more with external obstacles: financial struggles, pandemics, mental health problems, and environmental catastrophes. We also confront the shrinking faith in the “use of humanities” in the pressure to monetize degrees. But it’s also a time of new opportunities to bridge disciplines and reach new audiences. Literary scholars can and should engage in debates about cultural heritage more visibly and try to address a wider public. We should work with various institutions outside of academia, such as museums, libraries, or cultural institutes. When I visit museums such as the National Museum of the Middle Ages in Paris—the first time since before the outbreak of the pandemic—I’m surprised at the extent to which the renovation emphasizes a certain development of “French” medieval art. For instance, it is noted that an Italian cross is significant because it was a rare case of French Gothic influencing medieval Italian artists. Literary scholars should be aware of how national institutions preserve and represent cultural heritage. Medievalists are used to this kind of intervention because they must consider literature embodied through various media. This mediality is essential to understanding how a song or a text is shaped or addresses certain communities, whether that text is within a manuscript created by certain local makers in Paris or in Cyprus for a courtly coterie; or a song that may appear as an image in a stained glass window in fragments, or on the panel of a Sicilian casket with the kinds of animal designs found in Islamic art. Medievalists have the power and responsibility to shape how such cultural heritage archives are writing French history. At the same time, all of us in French studies need to focus on the literariness of French texts. If a Twitter post in French disseminates a different kind of French than the standard one taught in the schools, how is literature being remade through this medium? Showing students that there is a history to how French literature became literature—with the help of various institutions such as archives, museums, or publishing houses—can show them how cultural heritage and communal identity are literary constructs imbued with all kinds of political and ethical decisions made by governments, nations, and coteries. But first we must get them to love French literature in French.

As French scholars, we can have different opinions about what French studies should look like, but we are most likely against the idea of global monolingualism. There are nuanced lessons to be learned by reading French-language texts as they were originally written but also by translating them into different languages or by translating texts in these languages into French. Translation should be an essential part of our work as teachers and scholars. It might entail translating Old Occitan to English, or Old French to modern French; or it might be creative and musical translations of a troubadour song or a modern French paraphrase of the opening of Madame Bovary. From the classroom to broader communities to which we claim citizenship, such varied practices of translation slow us down and compel us to consider how reading, translating, and writing give form to individual thought and collective political action.

As medievalists have shown, texts written in ancien français in and outside of the Hexagon and circulated throughout Asia, Europe, Africa, and beyond during the twelfth through fourteenth centuries prefigure our global moment. To show the connections between then and now, medievalists are reconstructing global trade networks, analyzing representations of cultures and peoples with whom Latin Europeans such as Marco Polo would have interacted, conducting philological examinations of words, and studying etymological derivations from Arabic. For instance, Sharon Kinoshita’s work on “worlding” French literature reminds us that the French word bougie points toward the importance of the port of Bougie (Bejaïa) on the North African coast. Recent work by Eliza Zingesser shows the extent to which medieval French writers made prestigious Occitan troubadour song sound French without translating it into French, thus creating a literary history that begins with Frenchified Occitan song via formal procedures of cultural assimilation seen in manuscripts (Zingesser). Projects like these illustrate the dynamism and diversity of contemporary medieval studies and their contribution to broader conversations about canon formation and cultural identity.

In conclusion, from the medievalist perspective, French studies can remain relevant if we focus on how the French canon formed slowly over time within a global context, if we use philological tools to understand how linguistic structures and word meanings have changed, and if we emphasize the mediality of the objects at our disposal. Premodern studies of the interconnected world and the ways in which French culture and ideas were transmitted through various media such as manuscripts, songs, objects, and other materials can help us understand today’s changing linguistic landscape and can perhaps offer lessons on developing new translation practices. Finally, a new understanding of a shared cultural inheritance, grounded in the history of French culture and ideas but also including its adjacent related languages, such as Occitan, will enrich the very concept of “Frenchness” in our academic institutions while creating energetic, interdisciplinary relations with fields such as global studies, translation, linguistics, history, media studies, and art history.

WORKS CITED

Kinoshita, Sharon. “Worlding Medieval French.” In French Global: A New Approach to Literary History, edited by Christie McDonald and Susan Rubin Suleiman, 3–29. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

Zingesser, Eliza. Stolen Song: How the Troubadours Became French. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020.