St. Martinville, 1898 Mardi Gras
My current book project, Chansons créoles: A New Genealogy of the French Middle Ages, explores 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 from fishmongers, peasants, shepherds, children, lace workers, nuns, pub goers, and other "anonymous" folk living a distance from Paris, 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. 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, the "patois" of dispossessed francophonie in the U.S., the Caribbean, and lower Canada held the key to understanding medieval French vernacularity. The stories and songs that were gathered, often by coercive means furnished a key that promised to unlock sonic secrets of medieval vernacularity, to convey the musicality of the epics and lais, the dits and chansons that were rapidly being identified as essential to the French national spirit. The musicality of these dialects was believed to deliver an experience of French minstrels and augured a kind of authentic appreciation of medieval poetry.
Using this archiving effort as a 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 from fishmongers, peasants, shepherds, children, lace workers, nuns, pub goers, and other "anonymous" folk living a distance from Paris, 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. 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, the "patois" of dispossessed francophonie in the U.S., the Caribbean, and lower Canada held the key to understanding medieval French vernacularity. The stories and songs that were gathered, often by coercive means furnished a key that promised to unlock sonic secrets of medieval vernacularity, to convey the musicality of the epics and lais, the dits and chansons that were rapidly being identified as essential to the French national spirit. The musicality of these dialects was believed to deliver an experience of French minstrels and augured a kind of authentic appreciation of medieval poetry.
Using this archiving effort as a 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.