Hmmm... - Edit 2
Before modification by DomA at 19/02/2013 05:27:23 AM
You listed pretty much most of the longer works I've read in Old French.
I've always liked the poems of Villon, but he's more early renaissance (mid-1400s) and Middle-French. But it's still somewhere in between, language-wise.
There are many historical chronicles and such in Old French, though you'll probably have to go with e-books from the BNF and such for those (and often enough, they're scanned. How are you skills deciphering medieval French-style script?
) as, as far as I know, most aren't available in published form, at least not the full texts.
One of the paperback publishers (I forget which one, but neither Gallimard nor Livre de Poche) has or had a collection of medieval works. A lot are compendiums of various texts. I've not kept track of what's available in a while, but at the time I read in Old French (which was around 25 years ago) there were more works than those you listed, incl. non fiction.
The rest of what I bought were scholarly editions for literature students that will be gone now. One series I was particularly fond of were four big books from a Belgian university, each volume focusing on different roots of western literatu (in French for the annotations, but it had a Flemish name. It started with Boe, I think... maybe Boeck). There's one with the old celtic and norse texts, and one with mostly medieval latin texts, and another was mostly Old French. It did feature a wide variety of texts (aside from many of the better known), many religious or more mundane (non literary Old French is somewhat closer to Middle French). Those are at my parent's. I could ask for the title of the series but I very much doubt it's still available.
I have an old compendium dating back from the 1950s somewhere, I'll have to dig it up. It's definitely long gone, but scanning it I should be able to give you many more titles/authors of lesser known works that were featured.
One big classic you miss from your list would be Le Roman de Renart (Renart le Goupil, you call him Reynard the Fox, IRRC). That's as close to pop lit. as they had back then, but it's amusing (more than Marie de France, anyway). There are many farces and mysteries and proto-theater and scattered folktales, but they're hard to find in other form than from the BNF and other great libraries, often as scans rather than full text again.
A very good source to spot texts you might then be interested to track down and read would be to look in the dictionary. Mine (Larousse de L'Ancien Français) has references of first appearance in texts for most words, so that provides a pretty long bibliography.
A great deal more of Old French texts are of lesser interest as they're simply translations from Latin or Greeek.
Is the Kibler in French? It sounds an awful lot like the book I had bought to get me started (and it was awesome, even though the dictionary was a great help as well. I had to make do without one for a while as they come and go out of print. I managed to save enough to get the whole collection of historical dictionaries (Ancien, Moyen, Baroque, Classique) right before they went out of print. They've returned years later but no longer in the leather-bound edition I have them in)
Nowadays I use more often Le Robert historique de la langue française; it's closer to a dictionary of etymology, but following in detail the semantic shifts through time. It's... priceless to catch the nuances of anything from the 1600s to 1900s.
I've always liked the poems of Villon, but he's more early renaissance (mid-1400s) and Middle-French. But it's still somewhere in between, language-wise.
There are many historical chronicles and such in Old French, though you'll probably have to go with e-books from the BNF and such for those (and often enough, they're scanned. How are you skills deciphering medieval French-style script?
) as, as far as I know, most aren't available in published form, at least not the full texts. One of the paperback publishers (I forget which one, but neither Gallimard nor Livre de Poche) has or had a collection of medieval works. A lot are compendiums of various texts. I've not kept track of what's available in a while, but at the time I read in Old French (which was around 25 years ago) there were more works than those you listed, incl. non fiction.
The rest of what I bought were scholarly editions for literature students that will be gone now. One series I was particularly fond of were four big books from a Belgian university, each volume focusing on different roots of western literatu (in French for the annotations, but it had a Flemish name. It started with Boe, I think... maybe Boeck). There's one with the old celtic and norse texts, and one with mostly medieval latin texts, and another was mostly Old French. It did feature a wide variety of texts (aside from many of the better known), many religious or more mundane (non literary Old French is somewhat closer to Middle French). Those are at my parent's. I could ask for the title of the series but I very much doubt it's still available.
I have an old compendium dating back from the 1950s somewhere, I'll have to dig it up. It's definitely long gone, but scanning it I should be able to give you many more titles/authors of lesser known works that were featured.
One big classic you miss from your list would be Le Roman de Renart (Renart le Goupil, you call him Reynard the Fox, IRRC). That's as close to pop lit. as they had back then, but it's amusing (more than Marie de France, anyway). There are many farces and mysteries and proto-theater and scattered folktales, but they're hard to find in other form than from the BNF and other great libraries, often as scans rather than full text again.
A very good source to spot texts you might then be interested to track down and read would be to look in the dictionary. Mine (Larousse de L'Ancien Français) has references of first appearance in texts for most words, so that provides a pretty long bibliography.
A great deal more of Old French texts are of lesser interest as they're simply translations from Latin or Greeek.
Is the Kibler in French? It sounds an awful lot like the book I had bought to get me started (and it was awesome, even though the dictionary was a great help as well. I had to make do without one for a while as they come and go out of print. I managed to save enough to get the whole collection of historical dictionaries (Ancien, Moyen, Baroque, Classique) right before they went out of print. They've returned years later but no longer in the leather-bound edition I have them in)
Nowadays I use more often Le Robert historique de la langue française; it's closer to a dictionary of etymology, but following in detail the semantic shifts through time. It's... priceless to catch the nuances of anything from the 1600s to 1900s.