The project is dedicated to the study of the earliest texts of French and Occitan literature. They all precede the great literary
production of the 12th and 13th centuries and are located in a previous phase of formation of Gallo-Romance literary languages. It is
precisely through the mutual interrelation of linguistic and metrical structures, rhetorical articulations, and literary purposes within
these texts that we can better understand the beginnings and follow the unfolding of Old French and Occitan literary languages.
Our corpus consists of fourteen items (texts or groups of texts) with mainly religious content dated between the 9th and 11th
centuries, namely (we give the established titles in French): Séquence de Sainte Eulalie, Sermon sur Jonas, Passion de Clermont, Vie
de Saint Léger, Sponsus, Trope de l'Assomption (inc. Quant li solleilz converset en leon), Roman d’Alexandre d’Alberic (fragment),
spells of Clermont-Ferrand, Passion d’Augsburg (fragment), Aube de Fleury, Boeci, three short paraliturgical texts from a Saint
Martial de Limoges tropary (i.e. bilingual Marian song In hoc anni circulo / Mei amic e mei fiel, Versus Sanctae Mariae, trope known
as Tu autem), two pretrobadoric “Liebesstrophen”, and Chanson de Sainte Foi.
These are all versified texts (mainly in octosyllabic and decasyllabic lines) mostly organized in stanzas or laisses, with the exception
of Séquence de Sainte Eulalie in couplets of oscillating measure (according to the medieval Latin genre of the sequence) and the
Sermon sur Jonas in prose. Some of them are fragmentary texts for which it is not possible to assess the original consistency. As for
complete texts, their length varies between 28 and 600 verses. Added to these is the special case of Clermont-Ferrant’s spells, with
irregular versification typical of the genre, which also participate in the literary dimension. Our fourteen items are all transmitted by
a single testimony and have been edited and studied individually, but a scientific study of the entire corpus is lacking, as well as a
study of the manuscript testimonies and their milieu of production. Our project ultimately aims to re-examine all texts and analyze
all manuscripts that make up the corpus by bringing together for the first time linguistic, metrical, literary, musical,
cultural-historical, and codicological investigation. The result of the research will be an annotated edition available in hard copy and
a website where all materials will be searchable online.