In many ways, as the subtitle reveals, Klaus Grübl's monograph is two books rolled into one. The first half (chapters 1 to 4, nearly 200 pages) is an exhaustive, lucid and convincing review of the discussion of standardization of French during the Middle Ages. A helpful preview of this appeared in French in Grübl (Reference Grübl2013). The second half (chapter 5, 150 pages) is a detailed statistical and grapho-phonetic analysis of 89 Beauvais charters written between 1241 and 1455, and an attempt to apply to these documents the methodology of quantitative (and computerized) Skriptaforschung, more specifically, the approach which sees as a key determinant the place where documents were actually produced (cf. most importantly Glessgen, Reference Glessgen2008).
Grübl is unnervingly well read. Not only is he fully conversant with the history of the emergence and development of French, but he also draws on scholarship pertaining to the history of German. He is thus unusually well equipped to address the long-standing question of how – and when – the standardization of French occurred. He takes issue, I believe credibly, with Anthony Lodge's influential thesis of koineization in Paris, in speech, but also with Bernard Cerquiglini's arguments that standard French was a product of an educated elite, superimposed on the illiterate masses (why they would even have noticed is another matter). The author emphasizes the role of regional scriptae and of writing, broadly following the Koch/Oesterreicher model of the Nähe-Distanz-Kontinuum (Koch and Oesterreicher, Reference Koch and Oesterreicher1985; Koch, Reference Koch, Ágel and Hennig2010): documents with ambitions to be comprehended more widely will of necessity move towards standardized and supraregional forms.
The location on which Grübl focuses is interesting: within reach of Paris, Beauvais nonetheless remains part of the broad Picard domain. What happened there is thus likely to be relevant to any region where strong local traditions were in tension with the alleged centralizing pressure from Paris. Grübl breaks his documents down into a series of groups according to place of production. By ‘place’ he means, more precisely, lieu d’écriture or Schreiberstätte, i.e., both a geographical (diatopic) criterion and an institutional (diastratic) one. Patterns of ‘Picardization’ differ according to the ‘place’ from which documents, even in a closely circumscribed region, emerged. Thus, across a period of over two centuries, the importance of the lieu d’écriture is seen to be crucial.
In terms of the emergence of standard French in the later Middle Ages, the Beauvais corpus is revealing, and probably exemplary. It demonstrates that different production centres generate linguistic difference, conspicuously in the degree of ‘Picardization’ of documents. A supraregional scripta is only established relatively late, around 1380. An interesting suggestion is that these non-literary texts, in the earlier period (i.e., the thirteenth century) may have been influenced by the literary scripta, which tended from the outset towards less localized practices. The evidence of the Beauvais charters supports, inter alia, the hypothesis that the case system was a conservative, even archaising, purely written practice, and long since lost in speech. The Picard area retained it as an element in a writing tradition for longer than elsewhere. This perspective thus echoes that of, e.g., Stanovaïa (Reference Stanovaïa, Goyens and Verbeke2003; Reference Stanovaïa and Trotter2004).
The final section of the book (‘Ergebnisse der Korpusstudie’, 342–351) brings together the two pivotal elements around which its argument revolves: a detailed case study and a broader perspective on the standardization process in medieval French. Part of the strength of the book lies in this combination of wide reading and intelligent reflection, and empirical analysis of a substantial corpus of documents. The overall result is a convincing, well documented, authoritative study which should be considered essential reading for anyone interested in that fascinating subject called the history of French.
