SOURCE: “Latin Remnants in Joinville's French,” Philological Quarterly, Vol. XXVI, No. 4, October, 1947, pp. 289–301.

In the following essay, Bement analyzes the extant text of Vie de Saint Louis in order to determine how the French language of the time incorporated various remnants of Latin. Bement concludes that the text includes many such remnants that have led modern scholars to maintain that the text exhibits a certain “disorder” or “confusion.” Such “orthographical variety,” Bement argues, caused no confusion among thirteenth- and fourteenth-century writers and readers.

Definition of title is here not only a primary consideration but one which cannot at any point be relegated to a status of secondary importance.

The greater part of a century has elapsed since Charles Corrard's posthumous Observations sur le texte de Joinville¹ presented, in part unintentionally, the most scathing and impassioned criticism to which Joinville's composition has been subjected. In part unintentionally, because Corrard's...