Thanks, John! We really enjoyed your review too.

Done! Welcome

I'd love to! Is the Centre on BlueSky? I can only add BlueSky accounts to the starter kit, rather than web addresses ...

There's a lot more to say about the project, and over the next few weeks, we'll be introducing members of the project team in a bit more detail. For now, though, do give us a 'follow', and we look forward to having you along for the ride. It'll be LAF-a-minute! (Sorry.)

What might DNA evidence from medieval manuscripts tell us about their users? Where did the animals on whose skin our texts were written came from, and why does this matter?

We're building a database of texts and manuscripts that were used for teaching French in Britain between around 1200 and around 1500, while also investigating certain textual traditions in more depth. We're also asking questions informed by an emerging discipline: biocodicology.

What we don't know with nearly as much certainty is how exactly people from all walks of life actually *acquired* the language, and that's where LAF (as we're calling it) comes in.

... but all of these terms refer to a language that, as the last few decades of research have revealed, was used throughout Medieval Britain -- and for longer than we historically thought.

By 'Anglo-French', we're referring to the dialect(s) of French that people used throughout medieval Britain. It's an umbrella term, and one that goes by various other names, 'Anglo-Norman', 'insular French', and 'the French of England' to name just three, ...

We're a research project based at the Department of Languages, Cultures and Visual Studies at @uniofexeter.bsky.social, funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). At the heart of our work (which runs until 2028) is 'Anglo-French', and how exactly it was acquired during a specific time period.