St. Martinville, 1898 Mardi Gras
My current book project is tentatively entitled Chansons creoles: A New Genealogy of the French Middle Ages. This project offers a new genealogy of medieval studies by attending to nineteenth-century French efforts to transcribe and archive orality in francophone peripheries such as Brittany, Normandy, Acadia, St. Martinville, New Orleans, Guadeloupe and Martinique.
Beginning in September of 1852, under the direction of minister of education and religious affairs, Hippolyte Fortoul, the committee on French language, history, and the arts met in monthly plenary sessions to review submissions of poésies populaires collected in the provinces from fishmongers, peasants, shepherds, children, lace workers, nuns, pub goers, and other "anonymous" folk who came to symbolize a living spirit of the French past. Of particular interest to this project are the Committee's instructions for corresponding members to transcribe the songs, prayers, proverbs, and contes of overseas francophonie who were understood to still transmit oral forms that had originated in a medieval French past. As a result, over the next fifty years, collectors, folklorists, and philologists who were invested in defining themselves against "the medieval" extracted songs and tales from marginalized francophonie and sent them to Paris as evidence of temporal and acoustic difference, as living examples of medieval French. For these collectors, Acadian and afrocreole dialects held the key to understanding medieval French vernacularity.
Using this archiving effort as an over-arching guide for considering the construction of the discipline of medieval studies, my book embraces multiple temporalities and performance theory to propose fresh methods for the narration of medieval European history. Following a trajectory aligned with my own family’s circuitous wonderings from Paris and Caen to Guadeloupe and Acadia and finally to New Orleans and St. Martinville, this project reveals the French premodern as it flickers in carnival festivities, mortuary rituals, saints’ shrines and processions, cultural memory, and the performance of Cajun and Creole ballads and danses rondes, all of which challenge simple notions of an untangled “medieval” past that is indeed past. The book interweaves archival and manuscript research from libraries in France, Canada, the US, and the Caribbean, with family and community memory, in order to emphasize the multiple, intersecting timelines and cultural accretions through which we come to generate a present reckoning of the premodern past.
Beginning in September of 1852, under the direction of minister of education and religious affairs, Hippolyte Fortoul, the committee on French language, history, and the arts met in monthly plenary sessions to review submissions of poésies populaires collected in the provinces from fishmongers, peasants, shepherds, children, lace workers, nuns, pub goers, and other "anonymous" folk who came to symbolize a living spirit of the French past. Of particular interest to this project are the Committee's instructions for corresponding members to transcribe the songs, prayers, proverbs, and contes of overseas francophonie who were understood to still transmit oral forms that had originated in a medieval French past. As a result, over the next fifty years, collectors, folklorists, and philologists who were invested in defining themselves against "the medieval" extracted songs and tales from marginalized francophonie and sent them to Paris as evidence of temporal and acoustic difference, as living examples of medieval French. For these collectors, Acadian and afrocreole dialects held the key to understanding medieval French vernacularity.
Using this archiving effort as an over-arching guide for considering the construction of the discipline of medieval studies, my book embraces multiple temporalities and performance theory to propose fresh methods for the narration of medieval European history. Following a trajectory aligned with my own family’s circuitous wonderings from Paris and Caen to Guadeloupe and Acadia and finally to New Orleans and St. Martinville, this project reveals the French premodern as it flickers in carnival festivities, mortuary rituals, saints’ shrines and processions, cultural memory, and the performance of Cajun and Creole ballads and danses rondes, all of which challenge simple notions of an untangled “medieval” past that is indeed past. The book interweaves archival and manuscript research from libraries in France, Canada, the US, and the Caribbean, with family and community memory, in order to emphasize the multiple, intersecting timelines and cultural accretions through which we come to generate a present reckoning of the premodern past.