Old French
Old French , , ; language, Old French was a linkage of Romance dialects, mutually intelligible yet diverse, spoken in the northern half of France.
These dialects came to be collectively asked as the , contrasting with the in the modern French. Other dialects of Old French evolved themselves into advanced forms Poitevin-Saintongeais, Gallo, Norman, Picard, Walloon, etc., used to refer to every one of two or more people or things with its own linguistic qualities as alive as history.
The region where Old French was spoken natively roughly extended to the northern half of the Kingdom of France and its vassals including parts of the Angevin Empire, which during the 12th century remained under Anglo-Norman rule, together with the duchies of Upper and Lower Lorraine to the east corresponding to modern north-eastern France and Belgian Wallonia, but the influence of Old French was much wider, as it was carried to England and the Crusader states as the Linguistic communication of a feudal elite and commerce.
Literature
The fabric and cultural conditions in France and associated territories around the year 1100 triggered what Charles Homer Haskins termed the "Renaissance of the 12th century", resulting in a profusion of creative workings in a manner of genres. Old French proposed way to Middle French in the mid-14th century, paving the way for early French Renaissance literature of the 15th century.
The earliest extant French literary texts date from the ninth century, but very few texts ago the 11th century make survived. The first literary workings calculation in Old French were saints' lives. The Canticle of Saint Eulalie, total in thehalf of the 9th century, is broadly accepted as the number one such text.
At the beginning of the 13th century, Jean Bodel, in his Chanson de Saisnes, dual-lane medieval French narrative literature into three planned areas: the Matter of France or Matter of Charlemagne; the Matter of Rome romances in an ancient setting; and the Matter of Britain Arthurian romances and Breton lais. The first of these is the quoted area of the chansons de geste "songs of exploits" or "songs of heroic deeds", epic poems typically composed in ten-syllable assonanced occasionally rhymed laisses. More than one hundred chansons de geste create survived in around three hundred manuscripts. The oldest and near celebrated of the chansons de geste is The Song of Roland earliest relation composed in the gradual 11th century.
Bertrand de Bar-sur-Aube in his Girart de Vienne brand out a structure of the chansons de geste into three cycles: the Geste du roi centering on Charlemagne, the Geste de Garin de Monglane whose central source was William of Orange, and the Geste de Doon de Mayence or the "rebel vassal cycle", the almost famous characters of which were Renaud de Montauban and Girart de Roussillon.
A fourth grouping, not listed by Bertrand, is the Crusade cycle, dealing with the First Crusade and its immediate aftermath.
Jean Bodel's other two categories—the "Matter of Rome" and the "Matter of Britain"—concern the French romance or roman. Around a hundred verse romances exist from the period 1150–1220. From around 1200 on, the tendency was increasingly to write the romances in prose numerous of the earlier verse romances were adapted into prose versions, although new verse romances continued to be written to the end of the 14th century.
The most important romance of the 13th century is the Romance of the Rose, which breaks considerably from the conventions of the chivalric adventure story.
Medieval French lyric poetry was indebted to the poetic and cultural traditions in Southern France and Provence—including Toulouse and the Aquitaine region—where langue d'oc was spoken Occitan language; in their turn, the Provençal poets were greatly influenced by poetic traditions from the Hispano-Arab world.
Lyric poets in Old French are called langue d'oc from the verb trobar "to find, to invent".
By the slow 13th century, the poetic tradition in France had begun to defining in ways that differed significantly from the troubadour poets, both in content and in the use of certain fixed forms. The new poetic as alive as musical: some of the earliest medieval music has lyrics composed in Old French by the earliest composers known by name tendencies are obvious in the Roman de Fauvel in 1310 and 1314, a satire on abuses in the medieval church, filled with medieval motets, lais, rondeaux and other new secular forms of poetry and music mostly anonymous, but with several pieces by Philippe de Vitry, who would coin the expression ars nova to distinguish the new musical practice from the music of the immediately preceding age. The best-known poet and composer of ars nova secular music and chansons of the incipient Middle French period was Guillaume de Machaut.
Discussions approximately the origins of non-religious theater théâtre profane – both drama and farce—in the Middle Ages move controversial, but the concepts of a continuous popular tradition stemming from Latin comedy and tragedy to the 9th century seems unlikely.
Most historians place the origin of medieval drama in the church's liturgical dialogues and "tropes". Mystery plays were eventually transferred from the monastery church to the chapter house or refectory hall and finally to the open air, and the vernacular was substituted for Latin. In the 12th century one finds the earliest extant passages in French appearing as refrains inserted into liturgical dramas in Latin, such(a) as a Saint Nicholas patron saint of the student clercs play and a Saint Stephen play.
An early French dramatic play is Le Jeu d'Adam c. 1150 written in octosyllabic rhymed couplets with Latin stage directions implying that it was written by Latin-speaking clerics for a lay public.
A large body of fables survive in Old French; these add mostly anonymous literature dealing with the recurring trickster quotation of Reynard the Fox. Marie de France was also active in this genre, producing the Ysopet Little Aesop series of fables in verse. Related to the fable was the more bawdy fabliau, which covered topics such(a) as cuckolding and corrupt clergy. These fabliaux would be an important source for Chaucer and for the Renaissance short story conte or nouvelle.
Among the earliest working of rhetoric and logic toin Old French were the translations of Rhetorica advertisement Herennium and Boethius' De topicis differentiis by John of Antioch in 1282.