Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War.

Butterfield, Ardis. The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Print.

Butterfield's monograph pushes back against much of the weight of scholarship on the relationship between the French and English during the Hundred Years War by ultimately arguing that due to a shared language and literary culture these two nations may not have been as antagonistic as is often suggested. Butterfield's preface draws out the narrative on the subject, that tensions rose over the course of the war to generally divide the two nations, even to the extent that French becomes less popular. Instead, Butterfield suggests that French maintains a great deal of its importance in England during this period, and that the peaceful periods during the war were often involved great deals of cultural and economic exchange across the channel. 

Of particular interest to me is Butterfield's sixth chapter, in which she considers the role of "trading tongues" in London. Rather than focusing exclusively on the role of French in the London marketplace, although she does trace this out for the reader, Butterfield plots out how a wide range of languages and cultures intersected and interacted on a regular basis in the international port of London. Flemish, for example, is both a vital language for merchants exchanging with Flemish traders and leads to a particular cultural cache in regards to exchange, which Butterfield reads into Chaucer's Merchant's "Flemish hat." While the multilingual nature of trade in the London marketplace is an interesting perspective and further flavors my reading of trade in late medieval England, the turn of argument made for The Shipman's Tale in this chapter is somewhat odd. Butterfield reads the interplay between the merchant, wife, and friar in the tale as an allegory of the deceptive exchange in place between the French and English, which Butterfield ties together due to the somewhat incestuous metaphor, to borrow her phrase, of "cozyn" between these characters. I find this reading interesting, but it does feel like it needs more parsing out rather than occupying a relatively small section of this chapter. 

As a whole, Butterfield's book is an interesting and important, I think, reconsideration of several scholarly assumptions, suggesting overall that modern critics should rethink how they read Anglo-French relations in late medieval Europe.