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The French of England Translation Series (FRETS) aims to broaden the available range of the French works of medieval England. "French" here replaces the term "Anglo-Norman," normally used of texts composed in French in England between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries; it sometimes also replaces "Anglo-French," used of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century texts circulating between England and the Continent. Although "Anglo-Norman" has valid current uses (for example, in the continuing high-quality editions of the Anglo-Norman Text Society), it has tended to be associated with an older nationalizing history, based on post-medieval geopolitical configurations.

The term "French of England" is not fully descriptive, for there are in fact many kinds of French involved, and not only in England. Wales, Scotland, Ireland and various regions of medieval Europe were also territories where the texts placed under the rubric "French of England" circulated. But as a term, "French of England" has a usefully paradoxical quality that points to the complexities of multilingual and multicultural territories; and, given that "French" is a broader term than "Anglo-Norman" and "Anglo-French," it can denote French in, of, and from medieval England, in literary and documentary genres, especially during the main francophone period from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries. Many of these texts have not received the attention they deserve because they have been linguistically inaccessible. FRETS has therefore been conceived with the intention of enriching the available corpus of what has been called medieval "English" literature, and encouraging readers to return to the original French texts.

Forthcoming

VOLUME V

Henry, Duke of Lancaster: The Book of Holy Medicines (Le Livre de Seyntz Medicines)
Translated by Catherine Batt (University of Leeds)

Forthcoming 2011

OCCASIONAL PUBLICATION I

"Cher alme": Texts of Anglo-Norman Piety
Translated by Tony Hunt, Jane Bliss, and Henrietta Leyser

Forthcoming 2010 / 978-0-86698-433-1 / MR 385

VOLUME II

The Life of St. Alban by Matthew Paris
Translated by Thelma S. Fenster (Fordham University) and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (University of York, UK)

Forthcoming 2010

New Titles

VOLUME IV

The Birth of Romance in England:
The Romance of Horn
The Folie Tristan
The Lai of Haveloc
and Amis and Amilun
Four Twelfth-Century Romances in the French of England
Translated and Introduced by Judith Weiss (Cambridge University)
These four 12th-century Anglo-Norman romances, here translated into English for the first time, were written to entertain the families of those barons who accompanied William the Conqueror to Britain and who soon developed an interest in the legends of their adopted land. The poets they patronized created lively narratives linked to British history, topography, and folklore. The hero of the Romance of Horn, a sophisticated romance and the earliest to be written in Britain, is wrongly dispossessed and exiled, but defeats his Saracen enemies and returns in triumph to claim his inheritance. Similarly disinherited, the hero of the Lai of Haveloc is a Danish prince who eventually rules both England and Denmark. Cornwall is the setting for the Folie Tristan, a story of Tristan feigning madness in order to visit his lover, Iseut. Amis e Amilun celebrates two identical friends who exploit their resemblance to extricate themselves from tricky situations but have to pay the price.

2009 / 207 + xiv pages / 978-0-86698-390-7 / MR 344 / $45, £28

VOLUME III

Boeve de Haumtone and Gui de Warewic: Two Anglo-Norman Romances
Translated by Judith Weiss (Cambridge University)
Boeve de Haumtone and Gui de Warewic are two lively and colourful Anglo-Norman romances which are the predecessors to later Middle English narratives. The characters and plots they invented became popular all over Europe, and remained so until the nineteenth century. Here they are translated for the first time into modern English, which should enable scholars to pay them the attention they deserve and to understand much better the development of insular narrative in both the vernaculars of medieval England.

2008 / 264 + xiv pages / 978-0-86698-378-5 / MR 332 / $45, £28

VOLUME I

The History of Saint Edward the King by Matthew Paris
Translated by Thelma S. Fenster (Fordham University) and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (University of York, UK)
Matthew Paris (d. 1259), Benedictine monk of St. Albans Abbey, is a well-known artist, mapmaker, and Latin chronicler of English history and English and European affairs at large, who also composed and illustrated a number of verse saints’ lives in the French of England. His History of Saint Edward the King, dedicated to Queen Eleanor, is an important representation of the values and dynastic concerns of King Henry III’s reign. Paris’s life of Edward the Confessor emphasizes Edward as married virgin king, dispenser of wisdom and courtesy, miraculous healer and harmonious ruler, and it asserts dynastic and cultural continuity between Edward the Confessor and Henry III. The life is also notable for its portrayal of Anglo-Danish relations; its vilification of Harold Godwinson’s brief reign before the Battle of Hastings and the taking of the English throne by the Norman duke William; and its creative adaptations of romance, epic, historiography, and hagiography.

In addition to a prose translation of the life’s narrative verse and the rhymed rubrics accompanying its text and manuscript illustrations, this volume contains a full introductory discussion of the historical, cultural, literary and stylistic contexts in which Paris wrote Edward’s life. An appendix of passages from the original text, a generous selection of suggested further reading, and an index of proper names facilitate use of the volume in teaching. The volume has been carefully designed so that its translations of text and rubrics from the extant manuscript can be used in conjunction with the presentation of the manuscript on the web at www.lib.cam.ac.uk/MSS/Ee.3.59.

The volume inaugurates the French of England Translation Series, designed to make more widely available the large literary corpus (nearly a thousand texts) composed in the French of England from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. Although many such texts have been given excellent editions by the Anglo-Norman Text Society, more general awareness of medieval England’s French texts and records has often fallen between continental French scholarship and scholarship in medieval English. The works composed in the French of England include important texts which deserve attention in their own right, and are also important to a fully informed awareness of medieval English and Latin literature and historiography as participating in a multilingual culture in medieval Britain. The series is academically edited by Thelma Fenster and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, respectively professors of medieval French and medieval English literature, and has commissioned a dozen further scholarly and accessible translations of works in the French of England.

2008 / 166 + xvi pages / 978-0-86698-389-1 / MR 341 / $40, £24

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