초서의 수녀원장과 스트렛포드식 프랑스어

초록

The purpose of this essay is to reexamine the significance of the French “[a]fter the scole of Stratford atte Bowe” of the Prioress in the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales as the recent scholarship on the multilingual realities of the late medieval England including the still vibrant life of Anglo-French has much to shed new light on the matter. Having often been perceived as shamefully provincial, inauthentic or even deformed, the Prioress’s French has somehow stood as a metaphor for its speaker, who has also been perceived as less-than-intelligent and less-than-devoted. This essay argues that a multilingual perspective, rather than a far more entrenched monoglot perspective of the nineteenth- and the twentieth-century, has much to offer toward correcting this misconception.

키워드