The last post I made talked a lot about the struggles that I faced with some French language scroll assignments I was given for Twelfth Night. I thought that it would be useful to also talk about some of the resources I was able to find that ultimately helped me accomplish those tasks.
For the texts that were authored, they were both based on excerpts from the same extant piece. It is a tournament guide written by
René of Anjou, King of Jerusalem and Sicily in 1460. While not an obvious source for sample wording, there are several sections where he details pronouncements that should be made to certain audiences, or staging details during some of the pomp-heavy events featured in a month long tournament. What was most useful was that this page provides a side-by-side translation of the entire work into English!
There were a ton of other resources that I found and saved to my personal bookmarks, and most of them were found here. The Medieval Digital Resource guide has pretty much everything and anything you could imagine having to do with medieval language studies. Learning Welsh? They have resources. Need ancient Greek texts (like I do right now)? They have resources. Very very comprehensive!
While these weren’t particularly useful for this batch of assignments, one of the most interesting sources I found was a collection of letters from the archives in the Arxiu Capitular Cathedral in Barcelona. Very intriguing for look-and-feel wording choices. Sadly the originating documents at the University of Kansas seem to be no longer online, but at least there are some here.
The page that lead me to that resource was the same sort of document collection, this one from the American Academy of Research Historians of Medieval Spain. The University of California at Santa Cruz at least used to house their digital archive, and you can still find some remnants of it on the open internet, like this one.
The Internet History Sourcebooks Project housed by Fordham University has so much potential, and honestly I haven’t even scratched the surface of material here. These are mostly history texts, but there are some secondary sources / secondary+translation sources here. By its own admission, it is both a very large trove and a very old resource in internet terms, which means that a lot of links are frustratingly no longer active. But this is a great place to get lost for weekend…. or a week…. or a month….
One of the most fun pieces of work that I am doing concerns fealty oaths, and this wonderful, short, but broad resource was a lot of fun to find. http://www.dragonbear.com/fealty.html
The Corpus of Electronic Texts. Bless you. I found this site twice in my research, once through Notarial Records for Bordeaux and then again when started trying to find Norman texts. Lots here, lots that used to be here that can probably be uncovered again.
BYU didn’t want all those fancy, European universities to have all the fun, so they put out EuroDocs, which has a specifically searching Medieval and Renaissance section. https://eudocs.lib.byu.edu/index.php/History_of_Medieval_and_Renaissance_Europe:_Primary_Documents
These last two resources are less about using period texts and more about finding wonderful phrases to throw into a foreign language text. I think my favorite was “à couteaux tirés” which translates to “with daggers drawn” or “at knifepoint”. I found that at the French Idiom dictionary.
Finally, Linguee is a site where you enter an English phrase in, and it returns translations which use that phrase and the original French. Very helpful when doing translations, but beware that understand of the language is really useful here. Oh, and they don’t just do it for French. And they have an app that will do the same thing. Pretty awesome!