ABSTRACT
Very few French vernacular texts for the period up to about ad 1100 are extant. From the ninth century only two texts remain, the Strasbourg Oaths and the Sequence of Saint Eulalia, and from the tenth century only three, including some Notes for a Sermon on Jonah, the precarious survival of which, as the binding for another manuscript, testifies to the often chance nature of evidence becoming available to philologists. Given the sparseness of the documentation, it is perhaps especially important to bear in mind the type of texts with which we are dealing, whether as regards their discourse type, function and intended audience, or their region and dating, although evidence about these factors is lamentably lacking. Moreover, as we shall see in the discussion of the Oaths, it is often difficult clearly to distinguish these different parameters of variation, especially regional and chronological considerations. In no case do we have clear knowledge of the author. Nevertheless some general observations may usefully be made. For instance, it is striking that two of our four texts (1, 3) are non-literary in nature and use prose rather than verse (cf. Beer 1992). Whilst the Eulalia, Jonah Fragment, and Life of Saint Alexis all stem from a religious context, the notes for the sermon are clearly different in being preparatory rather than a final product, and intended only for the eyes of the writer. Again, all the texts bear witness to the close relationship between writing and speech, but in the case of Eulalia and Alexis we have a written version of a text, with the Jonah Fragment notes in preparation for the giving of a sermon, and as regards the Oaths perhaps a citation of spoken oaths, perhaps a version reworked for polemical purposes (see below). All four texts emphasize equally the close relationship between Latin and French during this period and the predominance of the classical language for writing, since they survive in manuscripts which are principally devoted to Latin texts.
