.

In late May 1995, thanks to the good offices of Professor Christiane Marchello-Nizia, of the É.N.S.-Fontenay/Saint-Cloud, an afternoon colloquium took place at Fontenay-aux-Roses. In addition to myself, Peter Shoemaker, Layla Ahsan Roesler and Daniel Solovay (from Princeton), those attending included (among others) Christiane Marchello-Nizia (Chair); Professors Gabriel Bianciotto and René Pellen, of the Centre d'Études Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale (Poitiers); Professor Simone Monsonégo, of the Université de Nancy II (Unité de Recherche sur le Français médiéval) and of the Institut National de la Langue Française (INaLF); Professor Geneviève Hasenohr, of the Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes (Section Romane), with her colleague, Claude Rabel, of the Orléans branch of the Institut; Professor Jérôme Baschet, of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales; Professor Bernard Cerquiglini, Director of the U.F.R. de linguistique at the Université de Paris VII-Denis Diderot; Professor Claude Cazalé Bérard, of the Université de Lille 3 (Italian); and Professor Fernande Dupuis, of the Université du Québec (Montréal). Several of the afore-named presented papers on electronic projects upon which they were engaged, all of them of very considerable interest to us, while I was able to explain to the entire group the nature and progress to date of our Charrette Project. Discussion at that meeting and later correspondence proved to be encouraging also. It was clear to most of us that a longer and more detailed prise de contact involving French and American specialists was very much in order. The date 23-27 March 1997 was set for a full-fledged colloquium at Princeton University.

In addition to those named above, I also met with a number of colleagues who were unable to attend the Fontenay meeting: Professor Emeritus Jacques Chaurand, a specialist in French dialectology and language history (Université de Reims); Dr. Frédéric Vergne, director of the Chantilly Museum library and a specialist in ORACLE-based data organization; and Professor Michel Zink, who occupies the Chair of Medieval French Literatures at the Collège de France. Finally, this summer I met at some length with Professor Robert Martin, head of the INaLF office in Paris and director of the groundbreaking lexicological project devoted to Middle French, Le Dictionnaire du moyen français.

After open and (sometimes) quite lengthy discussions with these French colleagues, I am persuaded that our Project is of particular significance to such French institutions as INaLF, the Poitiers Centre d'Études Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale, the C.N.R.S.-sponsored Institut de Recherches et d'Histoire des Textes, as well as to various on-going French research projects, for example, the above-named Dictionnaire du moyen français, the Université de Paris VII-based project titled Mutation de l'édition induite par le livre électronique (directed by Professor B. Cerquiglini and Jean-Louis Lebrave, of the C.N.R.S.), and the historical-image research undertaken by Professors Jean-Claude Schmitt, Jérôme Baschet, and others at the École des Hautes Études. It also seems to me that our Project's collaboration with French colleagues will serve to build bridges between them and such on-going United States-based activities as CETH and ARTFL. Scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic stands to gain from collaboration, in many ways--some surely unforeseen at the present juncture.

Let me add that the pedagogical implications of our experience should not go unmentioned. To continue to train students in Old French paleography and textual criticism without encouraging them to take full advantage of present electronic technologies--technologies with which the younger generations of today are far more comfortable than many of their elders--would, quite simply, be unconscionable.

What, it may be asked, does The Charrette Project have to offer at his particular point in time?

First of all, our Project provides a substantial linguistic and literary database: the complete surviving manuscript tradition of one of the major works--a corpus of some thirty to thirty-five thousand verse lines--by Chrétien de Troyes, who is arguably medieval France's most important narrative poet and who both lived and wrote during the "classical period" of literary Old French. Moreoever, unlike modern editions which utilize manuscripts in order to "recover," and print, the lost (presumed) holograph of its "author," our database presents an authentically medieval textual reality: Chrétien's "text" as it really existed within the dynamics of an Old French literary production extending from about 1215 to the close of the 13th century. We have preserved the manuscripts' punctuation (where it exists), and this might well offer clues as to how the texts were read out loud--a clearer grasp of their oral dimension; and, as stated above, we have done our best to replicate word separations as the diverse manuscripts have given them, which should furnish data as to the nature of the word, or lexical item, in Old French. Our poetico-rhetorical commentary tends to prove that a manuscript like the late-13th-century MS G is often more "faithful" to the 12th-century author's poetics than the much touted, and earlier, Guiot text (MS C). Interesting also for the medieval vernacular notion of authorship is the significantly higher incidence of hapaxes in the sections said to have been composed (with Chrétien's approval) by Geoffroi de Leigni when compared with that portion of the romance attributed to Chrétien himself. The Project database also provides a veritable laboratory for the study of the relationship between the (largely) francien-based Old French scripta and its actualization in dialect-colored (and largely oral?) manuscript redactions (especially Old Picard and champenois).

The Charrette Project has eliminated the need for a simple binarism of text vs. variant(s)--a requirement, it would appear, for modern printed editions. On the contrary, even in the case of so careful and poetically self-conscious an author as Chrétien de Troyes it seems that textuality comprises "variant readings." Thus, the copyist Guiot, whose interests (as displayed in the much praised MS Bibliothèque Nationale fonds français 794) were largely historiographical (and not poetic), did not perhaps so much "betray" Chrétien the artist as exploit what, in Chrétien (along with Wace and the matière de Rome), specifically served his main concerns. In a wider sense, then, a textual tradition like that of the Charrette represents the surviving corpus of intertextual relationships orbiting around the core of Chrétien's roman--the work, composed of approximately 7100 verses in rimes plates--and this fact has a number of important poetico-literary repercussions, including the undeniable reality that the Chevalier de la Charrette remained poetically relevant to a late-13th-century Picard-speaking audience, presumably an audience not in all ways similar to that of Marie de Champagne's court in 1180. (Other, clearly related intertextual dimensions include those connecting the Lancelot to such other rhymed narratives as the various Tristan et Iseut redactions, the romances pertaining to the matière antique, and even to Chrétien's own oeuvre: Yvain and the Conte du Graal, not to mention the prose redactions of the Vulgate cycle.)

The Charrette Project suggests various possibilities for continued research in the present moment and for the future. Thus, work confined to the Chevalier de la Charrette is, itself, far from "complete," and, as time goes on, will certainly require further refinements and improvements; indeed, one suspects, "completeness" is beside the point, and, here also, the Project recalls the medieval notion of textual tradition which, though of course finite, can never be declared "complete." However, the core database--transcriptions and images--will remain to all intents and purposes constant, subject principally to the correction of errors and to the improvement of the images with the passage of time.

Still our Project possesses a certain model value. One would hope that the other works making up Chrétien's oeuvre romanesque, along with at least several other 12th-century "courtly" narratives like those of Marie de France, the Floire et Blanchefleur corpus, several romans antiques, and certain epigonal romances like the Perceval Continuations, Fergus and the Bel Inconnu could eventually be digitized and "imaged" according to our Charrette model--perhaps, also a representative selection from the Roman de la Rose tradition.

Were such a corpus to be established, particularly with the addition of several saints' lives, two or three chansons de geste, material from the Roman de Renard and from the fabliaux, sufficient documentation would be at hand for serious computerized study of the Old French literary language and scripta, in their relationship to the spoken language--indeed, of what I should be tempted to label the "Old French vernacular." One recalls Lucien Foulet's trailblazing masterpiece, Petite Syntaxte de l'ancien français (1923)--the first work to consider Old French as a language in its own right--which was based on documentation much more slender than that proposed above, and for which the resources offered by computerization were of course not available.

Ever since the days of early nineteenth-century Romantic scholarship--i.e., for close to two centuries now--debate has raged among Romanists as to the "orality" or the "written nature" of medieval French literature, particularly in respect to certain genres like the chansons de geste. At times these debates have been acerbic--one suspects, because of the "either/or" character of the thinking expressed. For the Central European Romantics and their early French disciples (like Gaston Paris), the Old French chansons de geste were to be considered as authentic expressions of the "voice of the people"--often of its Germanic stratum--articulated, as it happened, in Romance form. Thus, the epic songs were improvised virtually on the field of the battles which they celebrated, and later underwent revision and lengthening in order to assume narrative shape. Only the later, revised songs came to be written down, yet they are the product of original, oral poems or, to use Gaston Paris's term, epic cantilènes created by anonymous bards. During the early decades of the 20th century this view was challenged by Joseph Bédier, who argued that a 12th-century chanson de geste in Old French was exactly that: a 12th-century French poetic artifact, corresponding to the new late-11th-century fervor for massive pilgrimages across Europe, especially to Santiago de Compostela, and to the implementation of Pope Urban II's call for Latin crusading activity in the Muslim-held Holy Land--an activity he described as gesta Dei per francos.

Except for a few rare, mostly French, scholars influenced by the pioneering work of Edmond Faral, the important rôle played by what deserves to be labelled "bookishness" in this whole literary process, which ought to include also hagiography (e.g., the La Vie de saint Alexis) and, even quite self-consciously, the mid-12th-century emergence of romance narrative, was somewhat downplayed. By and large scholars hailing from nations peripheral to France--the Spanish (don Ramón Menéndez Pidal, with his theory of poesía latente), the Swiss (with their tradition of interest in Romance linguistic geography, dialectology and lexicology), and, to a somewhat lesser degree, Belgians--like the Germans, have tended to look with favor on "orality." (One thinks of the late Jean Rychner and his work on epic formulas and on the fabliaux, as well as on the late Paul Zumthor's fascination with African modes of story-telling associated with griots--both of these distinguished scholars were Swiss.) However, it has been suggested that very few indispensable structural elements central to the Oxford Chanson de Roland are lacking in Einhard's Vita Karoli (Uitti 1993). Analagously, the Old French Vie de saint Alexis exists as the vernacular resolution of, and as a commentary on, the much older Vita sancti Alexii (to be found in close to intact form in the Bollandist repertory of Latin saints' lives). That the mid-12th-century Roman d'Énéas was based on Virgil's Æneid has, of course, never been denied, nor has the pervasive presence of Ovidian values and procedures in this work ever been ignored. Yet, only rather recently have we begun to understand the importance of truly 12th-century vernacular values permeating this great poem: courtoisie, for example, in the treatment it gives to Virgil's beautiful bellatrix, Camilla, in her one-on-one combat with the disgracefully discourteous Tarchon, and in its depiction of the very touching man-woman friendship--the first of its kind in Western literature, to my knowledge--between Camilla and Turnus. The "vernacular values" we associate with courtoisie necessarily have their counterparts in speech constructs. The Roman d'Énéas thus fuses, so to speak, seamlessly Classical bookishness (the possession of clergie) with the essentially vernacular values of that form of speech we call "courtly diction." Similarly, the Oxford Roland combines the history of "our emperor"--Charlemagne--as reported by Einhard with the historical needs and aspirations of late-11th-century Capetian France. The Roland articulates both the legitimacy of that douce France and its identity.

Consequently, in my view, "orality" and "writing," when opposed antithetically to one another, come very close to resembling a red herring; in significant ways this opposition flies in the face of literary and spoken historical fact. In a very profound sense, the spoken French of the 12th and 13th centuries--like the language of the vernacular scripta, which, itself, is manifested in manuscripts usually colored (teintés) by the dialect of those for whom it was written (and to whom it was read aloud) and/or of the copyist, i.e., "oral" features--is inextricably entwined with book-based usages and "colors."

The issues I have just mentioned bear looking into seriously. Programs allowing the comparison of indirect speech of given characters with examples of oratio recta could easily be devised, as could search programs identifying examples of complex verbal constructs, or of various sorts of inversion. One thinks of the written/oral discourse attributed to the narrator figure in poems like the Alexis where present and past tense often appear to be "mixed up" in ways startlingly similar to very colloquial story-telling, even in our own day. Also, one might query, to what degree, and how, is speech possibly determined by gender? By what means does an "illustrious vernacular" come into being over a time? Evidence tending to prove the existence of such a concept in the period that interests us may be found in a number of Chrétien de Troyes's successors who do not stint in their praise of his Frenchlanguage. Written and spoken discourse mutually authenticate one another. (One is reminded of Erich Auerbach's sensitive derivation of a new, Romance sublime style from the old Christian sermo humilis of Antiquity.) Also, computer-assisted analysis of specimens of high courtly diction in comparison with examples of the systematic reversals of such diction in the fabliaux would be highly instructive. After all, a fabliau like "La Fille qui ne voulait point entendre parler de foutre" specifically demonstrates the 13th-century consciousness of this humorous, and sometimes rather touching, play of reversal.

What is required in order to bring off a properly articulated understanding of the "Old French" which I have been attempting here briefly to describe is a philologically-based and imaginatively oriented team effort calling upon language historians--lexicologists, syntacticians, phonologists, dialectologists--and specialists in the styles and languages of Old French narrative and lyric poetry. I believe that a satisfactory preliminary grasp of the conditions of verse must antecede, both poetically and linguistically, the devising of interesting approaches to prose. I understand here "verse" and "prose" as being both of intrinsic and of documentary interest. Codicologists, art historians, and historians tout court of the French Middle Ages--I am thinking of colleagues working under the auspices of such important institutions as the Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes and the Centre d'Études Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale, as well as the École des Hautes Études--should from the start be associated with the enterprise which, in my view, ought to be multinational in scope, but founded on a specific collaboration between scholars from the United States and from France, with centers at Princeton and in France, at Poitiers, at the Centre d'Études Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale.

Within this much larger context, our Charrette Project constitutes but a small initial step--a point of departure for other--similar or quite different--efforts that one by one, but taken together, will fully integrate into the domain of French studies that beautiful, and foundational, treasure we call "Old French." For was not also the vernacular language spoken in the lands that gave us, in the 12th and 13th centuries, Gothic architecture, Scholastic philosophy, the university, the beginnings of the nation state, and so much else that remains central to our own ways of being at the very heart of these gifts? To claim otherwise would be quite unreasonable.

Auerbach, Erich. Literatursprache und Publikum in der lateinischen Spätantike und im Mittelalter (Berne: Francke, 1958) [Eng. trans., Ralph Manheim, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965)]

Bédier, Joseph. Les Légendes épiques. Recherches sur la formation des chansons de geste. 4 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1908-13 [3rd ed. 1926-29]).

Faral, Edmond. Recherches sur les sources latines des contes et romans courtois du moyen âge (Paris: Champion, 1913).

Foulet, Lucien. Petite syntaxe de l'ancien français. 3rd rev. ed. (Paris: Champion, 1930 [1st ed. 1923]).

Menéndez Pidal, Ramón. La "Chanson de Roland" y el neotradicionalismo (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1959) [French trans., I. Cluzel, La "Chanson de Roland" et la tradition épique des Francs (Paris: Picard, 1960)].

Rychner, Jean. La Chanson de geste: essai sur l'art épique des jongleurs (Geneva: Droz, 1955).

------. Contribution à l'étude des fabliaux. 2 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1960).

Uitti, Karl D. "'Ço dit la geste': Reflections on the Poetic Restoration of History in The Song of Roland," in Rupert T. Pickens, ed., Studies in Honor of Hans-Erich Keller: Medieval French and Occitan Literature and Romance Linguistics (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1993), 1-27.