Duelling dictionaries?

Two leading dictionaries of medieval French, the Anglo Norman Dictionary at Aberystwyth University and the Dictionnaire de l'ancien français at Heidelberg University, are to collaborate on a study of an unpublished Anglo Norman text about the First Crusade.

Heidelberg, romantic home of the ‘student prince', of famously duelling students, and of an equally famous student prison, is the seat also of one of the oldest and most distinguished universities in Germany.

It is a strikingly attractive town which is on the ‘must-visit’ list for foreign tourists and houses one of the most prestigious projects in medieval French linguistics, the Dictionnaire de l’ancien français (DEAF), an etymological dictionary of Old French which was started in the 1960s.

A long-standing cooperation between the Anglo-Norman Dictionary (AND), now based in the Department of European Languages at Aberystwyth University, and the DEAF has been rewarded by success in a new research funding scheme which brings together British and German scholars, and is supported by the German Research Council and the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. This is a new initiative which reflects the increasingly international nature of academic work.

Professor David Trotter, Head of the Department of European Languages and Director of the Anglo-Norman Dictionary at Aberystwyth University said;
“Collaboration between the AND and the DEAF, mostly informal, goes back to the 1960s and has been developed over recent years with visits in both directions. Now it will be more formal: the grant awarded will pay for a 50% research post, for a researcher to spend two years in Heidelberg and one year in Aberystwyth, and to produce a Ph.D. based on a study of an unpublished Anglo-Norman text about the First Crusade.”

“The researcher will get to see the close workings of the two dictionaries and further cooperation will certainly ensue. The AND is already fully digitised and the DEAF soon will be and electronic as well as human links are already operational.”

“Anglo-Norman, as the form of French used in medieval Britain, is of course really just a variation on medieval French: the distance between them is much less than is often thought, and is not unlike the difference between US and British English.”

“Contacts across the Channel continued right through the Middle Ages, with English wool and cloth being exported to France and Italy, and English lead being used in French cathedrals. Scholars like Gerald of Wales studied in Paris, and French books came to England and were translated and adapted into both English and Welsh. Scholarly cooperation within modern Europe can be seen, in a way, as a continuation of that tradition. The days of duelling are, it seems, over. We are part of Europe again,” he added.