Latin and French at the Capetian royal chancellery in the 13th century

Paul Videsott is full professor of Romance philology at the Faculty of Education of the Free University of Bozen- Bolzano. He received his research doctorate (PhD) in Romance Philology from the University of Innsbruck. In addition to his position at UNIBZ, he is scientific director of the South Tyrolean Institute of Ethnic Groups, president of the scientific commission of the Ladin Institute "Majon di Fascegn" in Vigo di Fassa, editor-in-chief of the series Scripta Ladina Brixinensia and of the Europäisches Journal für Minderheitenfragen / European Journal on Minority Issues, and co-editor of the Revue de Linguistique Romane. A long-time contributor to the MLA International Bibliography as a field indexer, he is currently serving a term on the Bibiography’s Advisory Committee.

Presentation

"One of the great unanswered questions in the history of French is when and why the royal institutions of Paris, and in particular the royal chancellery, the most important of these, began to use French. This state of affairs is all the more striking given that one of the central theses of French scriptology is that the early linguistic 'uniformity' and 'regularity' of northern France was due to the irradiation of the 'Parisian' model (or 'Francien', as it was called in the late 19th century), which would have influenced the oic scriptae through not only literary but also administrative channels.

Our research project, carried out as part of the work for the Documents linguistiques galloromans collection and focusing on the acts of the royal chancellery and provostry of Paris in the 13th century, gives us, for the first time, the opportunity to analyze the question more closely on an empirical rather than speculative basis."