The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare

Traces the cultural legacy of the Norman Conquest in England from 1350 to 1600; how English literature emerged out of the presence of French language and culture in medieval and early modern England. Includes chapters on Chaucer, the Corpus Christi Plays, William Caxton, early Tudor poetry, and Shakespeare.

---

What was the impact of the Norman Conquest on the culture of medieval and early modern England? Deanne Williams answers this question by contending that not only French language and literature, but the idea of Frenchness itself, produced England's literary and cultural identity. Examining a variety of English representations of, and responses to, France and 'the French' in the work of Chaucer, Caxton, Skelton, Shakespeare and others, this book shows how English literature emerged out of a simultaneous engagement with, and resistance to, the pervasive presence of French language and culture in England that was the legacy of the Norman Conquest. Drawing upon theories of gender and postcoloniality, this book revises traditional notions of English literary history by inserting France as a primary element in English self-fashioning, from Chaucer's Prioress to Shakespeare's Henry V.