The Society for French Studies’ Postgraduate Conference on ‘Vitality and Resilience’ took place on 28 May 2021. Like the previous year’s conference, it took place entirely online due to the ongoing global health crisis caused by Covid-19. In 2021, the then Postgraduate Officer Melissa Pawelski (University of Warwick) was joined by a co-organizer, who had contributed as a speaker to the PG conference in 2020, Julia Ribeiro S. C. Thomaz (EHESS/Paris-Nanterre). We decided to focus on the two-fold theme of ‘vitality’ and ‘resilience’ to offer a space in which ideas and stories could be exchanged, but we also insisted on the need to conduct research on these themes, at postgraduate level, in the arts and humanities. The Trésor de la langue française defines ‘vitalité’, firstly, as the ‘qualité d’un être vivant ou d’une collectivité qui manifeste une importante énergie, un grand dynamisme’. The event’s first sign, ‘vitality’, was thus chosen to breathe new life into our research projects.

e il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare The profusion of books is like a great ocean. So thought the seventeenth-century bibliographer Francesco Marucelli, who attempted to catalogue the print output of the age in his vast Mare magnum omnium materiarum.1 And, like a book lost at sea, an uncatalogued book sunk deep within the archives and at the mercy of the scholarly current may remain lost indefinitely.2 Thanks to advances in the digitization of catalogues, however, such texts have become much easier to trace. This is the story of one such text, an Italian translation of the earliest history of the French language, Claude Fauchet’s Recueil de l’origine de la langue et poesie françoise. This manuscript was believed literally to have been lost at sea, until I discovered it this year in the collections of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan.

In the thirty-second chapter of Rabelais’s Pantagruel (1532),1 the giant Pantagruel’s army is on its way to fight the enemy Dipsodes. Suddenly, they find themselves caught in a downpour. To protect his troops from the rain, Pantagruel sticks out his enormous tongue, which covers all of his soldiers except one, the human narrator Alcofrybas. Alcofrybas climbs onto Pantagruel’s tongue and wanders into his mouth. There, he finds an entire inhabited world, with forests, farms and cities. When he makes his way out of Pantagruel’s mouth, the giant asks where he has been, how long he has been there, and what he ate and drank, to which his companion answers truthfully. The last question sets up the twist and punchline: Pantagruel asks, ‘où chioys tu?’, to which Alcofrybas replies: ‘En vostre gorge, monsieur.’ (This was a customary response to the insult bran, or merde.)2 While scholars have noted the thematic links to the European encounter with the New World in this chapter of Pantagruel, none to my knowledge has extended that theme to the structure of the episode. The structure of the chapter is a cartographic joke that satirizes the ossified teachings of the Sorbonne.

To celebrate the 75th anniversary of the journal, French Studies is delighted to announce an essay competition, on the theme of ‘The Future of French Studies’. We invite submissions in French or English, of no more than 3,000 words; the winning submission, as selected by the journal’s editors, will be published in the journal and made freely available on the journal’s website, and will form the subject of a round-table discussion at the 2022 conference of the Society of French Studies. Across the 75 years of its existence, French Studies has seen the discipline it serves become an increasingly plural field: in addition to the linguistics and literature, in the broad sense of lettres humaines, that formed its initial core, the discipline now embraces such different areas as film and visual culture, politics, translation studies and cultural history, among many others. Crucially, and precisely during the lifetime of the...

Historical linguistics can resort to neither recordings nor interviews of native speakers. The only type of material that can be dissected is of a textual nature. This leads to two main issues: first, it has been widely observed in the literature that the choice of a certain register over another shapes the results of the investigation.1 For instance, the syntax of a poem will offer different perspectives on a language than the syntax of a recipe. Second, and this is particularly relevant to French (amongst other languages), the written language often retains archaisms that are not found in the oral tongue. However, building a corpus of non-literary material may lead to consistent findings in diachronic studies. More precisely, the use of legal material is put forward here. This choice stems from other studies investigating different languages and is discussed here within the French historical context. The present article comes...

COVID-19 and SFS activities: Due to the ongoing crisis relating to COVID-19, the Society for French Studies has again decided to move the postgraduate conference online. The postgraduate conference will take place on 28 May 2021. The deadline for applications to the Society for French Studies Visiting International Fellowship scheme has been postponed, in light of the continuing coronavirus situation. We will keep the situation under review and announce a new deadline in due course. We hope to be able to appoint a Visiting International Fellow for 2021/22 if at all possible. The 62nd annual conference of the Society for French Studies will take place on 28–30 June 2021. We are delighted to be offering a full and varied range of papers following a robust response nationally and internationally to our supplemental call for papers. The Society will circulate more information regarding the conference shortly. See <https://www.sfs.ac.uk/conferences/2021-annual-conference> for...

News Spring 2021 French Studies Bulletin, Volume 42, Issue 157, Spring 2021, Pages 17–19, https://doi.org/10.1093/frebul/ktaa024 Published: 12 March 2021

Postgraduate Bulletin Board Winter 2021 Get access French Studies Bulletin, Volume 41, Issue 156, Winter 2020, Pages 85–89, https://doi.org/10.1093/frebul/ktaa018 Published: 19 October 2020

Annual Conference: The 60th Annual Conference will be held at Royal Holloway, University of London, 1–3 July 2019. We are delighted to be offering a full and varied range of contributions following a very strong response nationally and internationally to our call for papers. The conference programme and registration details will be circulated shortly, as will details of plenary speakers. Please note that postgraduate travel bursaries are available to help enable postgraduate students to attend the conference. For full information on these bursaries, please contact our conference officer, Victoria Turner, vct2@st-andrews.ac.uk. We look forward to welcoming you to Royal Holloway. Prize Research Fellowship: The Society is pleased to announce that the 2019 Prize Research Fellowship competition is now open for applications. The Fellowship, which is open this year to early and mid-career academics in all areas of French Studies (see below), will cover the cost of a one-semester replacement lectureship at the lowest point of the Junior Lecturer scale (to include gross salary, National Insurance, superannuation and a London allowance where applicable) to enable the successful candidate to take research leave. The Fellowship will be tenable for a period in the 2019–20 academic session.