The influence of orality in the shaping of medieval Romance texts has been a topic of extensive research. However, few researchers have explored the rich potential for parallels from recent sociolinguistic and ethnographic literature on oral narrative in modern vernaculars. Moreover, most research in medieval Romance has focused on early genres, such as the epic. This research compares lengthy textual excerpts from 12 works of the 13th and 15th centuries drawn from a single genre, the French historical prose narrative. The primary goal is to contribute to a better understanding of the continuing development of a distinctly literate communicative tool in late medieval France and of its debt to earlier literary modes more firmly rooted in oral, performative contexts. An analytical narrative framework developed by the sociolinguist, William Labov, is used as the principal analytical tool. A number of indices of orality (and/or involvement-focus) are also applied to the texts of this study in an effort to discover any diachronic patterning that may be related to the issue of textual orality.
Chapter 1 of this study is devoted to an extensive review of the literature concerning textual orality from first a general perspective and then from one more squarely focused upon medieval French textual materials. Chapter 2 provides a detailed presentation of the Labovian narrative framework used in the analysis of the prose excerpts. I use previous applications of this framework and recent research on the description of narrative, as guides to the extensions and modifications I bring to the original design.
Chapters 3, 4 and 5 include comparative examinations of the data generated by the various aspects of the analysis. Chapter 3 examines the various non-evaluative components of the Labovian framework while Chapter 4 is concerned with the relative use of external and internal evaluation. Chapter 5 presents a detailed looked at the results of the application of the indices of orality.
I hope to show convincingly in the final chapter that there is strong motivation for postulating a diachronic image of later medieval prose as a medium continuing to evolve toward a less performatively-oriented form of communicative discourse.