Welcome

French-language books printed in England from 1480 to 1685 are an essential corpus for understanding how cross-Channel cultural mobility informed early modern writing and reading practices. They offer valuable insights into religious, political, social, and cultural life of the time. Yet they are little known because they fall outside the boundaries of English and French Literature traditionally conceived.

Our project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and based at the Universities of Birmingham and Cambridge, is the first detailed study of these texts. You can use this website to learn about our team and objectives, discover more about how we are compiling our corpus, access our project database, and download our project publications.

The Project

Our project is the first detailed study of almost 400 surviving French-language print publications in the British Isles to 1685. We are combining analysis of the whole corpus with investigation of case studies that will help us better understand the variety of social situations in which French was being used.

We are also transcribing a selection of French texts to begin addressing the monolingual bias of the EEBO-TCP corpus, and will promote engagement with the Huguenot Library’s collections. More broadly, we hope to inspire further research into foreign-language publication and other topics that move past fixed ideas of monolingual national cultures.

We are keen to hear from anyone with an interest in our research! Please feel free to contact a member of the project team with questions and comments.