Linguistic and Material Counterculturalism in the French Renaissance: Claude Fauchet’s Recueil de l’origine de la langue et poesie françoise (1581)

Abstract

Our current paradigm of sixteenth-century French vernacular discourse can be epitomized on the one hand by the classically inspired poetics of translatio propounded by the Pléiade, and on the other, by the scholarly efforts to establish a noble genealogy for the French language by writers such as the printer and Hellenist Henri Estienne. This picture, however, merely constitutes one of several sixteenth-century narratives regarding the French vernacular. Claude Fauchet’s Recueil de l’origine de la langue et poesie françoise (1581) provides evidence of a lively and appreciative interest in medieval French poetry among a group of Parisian jurist-humanists whose valorization of medieval French textual and material culture was developed in direct opposition to the dominant tenor of contemporary vernacular discourse which sought to break away from France’s medieval past. Fauchet in particular is notable for his seminal contribution to French literary history, his keen awareness of the role of vernaculars in history, and his sensitivity towards the material aspects of France’s native past.