Banniard, Michel
▶ Watch on YouTubeCoverage note: full - automatic transcript machine-translated into English from a French lecture. Latin quotations and some names are garbled, and the lecturer refers to a handout that is not available.
Core ideas
Around the year 1000, the emerging langue d'oïl met two neighbours: its own Latin past, and the Occitan-speaking south, which was taking shape as a distinct linguistic space. The lecturer studies this confrontation through an exceptional witness, Bernard of Angers. Bernard was a scholasticus, better rendered as "professor" than "schoolmaster", trained in the Loire schools and proud of his links with Fulbert of Chartres. Between 1010 and 1030 he travelled to Conques to collect the miracles of Sainte Foy, whose gold reliquary statue drew pilgrims, and wrote two books of Miracula. His Latin is self-consciously elevated, always at levels 1-2 of the lecturer's Carolingian typology and never at the "Latiniform" levels 4-5. It draws on archaic, Terentian or Virgilian idioms, probably through glossaries. The local language is never named as romanice or romanz, only as rusticus or vulgaris, a refusal the lecturer reads as repression rather than absence. Speech is always transposed into polished Latin, even when the speakers are angry peasants, the blinded Gerbert reproaching the saint or the warrior monk Gimon threatening to throw her statue into a well. Only a few local words slip through: place names, a hand-span measure, boias (iron shackles), and ioca for sacred games, an early trace of the word behind the Jeu d'Adam. Bernard even leaves out three names because of "the horror of their barbaric sound".
Bernard's prejudices are worn down in two areas. First, he arrives with a Carolingian, iconoclastic distrust of three-dimensional statues of saints, a southern custom inherited from antiquity. He mocks the statue in Latin to his Angevin companion Bernier, so that his Occitan-speaking escort cannot understand, comparing it to an idol fit for Jupiter or Mars. It is Sainte Foy herself, through well-aimed miracles, who makes him change his mind. Second, he meets Pierre, a bearded lay abbot from the Auvergne travelling in great pomp, who speaks refined Latin. Through him he discovers a cultivated southern lay elite. Following Christian Lauranson-Rosaz, the lecturer argues that this elite was far less corrupt than the Gregorian reformers later claimed.
On language Bernard does not give way. At night vigils, pilgrims who did not know Latin sang cantilenae in their "rustic" tongue, and he persuaded the monks to lock them out. The doors then burst open "miraculously", which the lecturer reads as a "rational miracle": the crowd forced its way in and the saint was credited, so that an old local could conclude that innocent songs in the vernacular must be tolerated. The lecturer distinguishes these structured cantilenae, a genre attested in Romance since the Eulalia sequence of about 880, from ordinary vociferationes. He links them to the Occitan Canso de Santa Fe, which claims both its Latin source and the beauty of its own language, as a possible answer from local elites to clerical disdain. Contemporary local charters show Occitan in Latin dress (levels 4-5), and he argues that Latin spelling and phrasing prepared written Romance rather than suppressed it. He rejects the labels "vulgar" and "vernacular" literature as echoes of clerical terminology. In the discussion he defines proto-French as Romance speech written in Latin form. He ties the rise of written vernaculars in the 9th-10th centuries to new feudal elites, Germanic and Romance, claiming a literary language of their own, and criticises the diglossia model as a barrier to studying how Latin worked as a tool for normalising the new languages.
Excerpts
The lecturer on Bernard's silence about the Romance language's name:
“It is a bit surprising to never encounter the terms romanalis or romaniké. They are at the origin of the designations used in literary texts in langue d'oc, romanz or romance. [...] Precisely, this absence does not indicate their non-existence at that date of development, but rather their repression by an intellectual tenaciously attached to his clerical difference.”
The lecturer on the night vigils at Conques:
“The clergy, for their part, as well as those who have mastered Latin, chant psalms and vigils. But those who are ignorant of this knowledge soothe the boredom of an endless night with canticles sung in their rustic tongue as well as various ditties. [...] So, indignant, he opens a debate with the monastic community in charge of the church to persuade them to forbid this linguistic disorder.”
The lecturer on Latin as preparation for written Occitan:
“That is, the development of the legal language, the syntax, the phrasing, the formulations, Latin prepared it. I agree. And and Occitan was molded onto it, and the spelling as well. [...] So, how does writing... how does writing serve to smooth out this difference to make horizontal intercommunication possible? And Latin functioned constantly like that, just as French functions today”