The French of Italy Archiving Dossier Narrative

French-language texts and French-speaking leaders were present and influential on the Italian peninsula from the late thirteenth through the late fifteenth centuries. These two phenomena, although related linguistically, were traditionally examined separately according to disciplinary boundaries -- historians of Italy have seen French political actors as important yet marginal characters in the larger story of Italy, and literary scholars have examined French texts created and copied in Italy as, at best, developmental stepping-stones in the inevitable march towards the Italian vernacular, or at worst, linguistic curiosities. When the French of Italy (FOI) website was first launched in 2009, few scholars had seriously considered how French functioned outside of the medieval Kingdom of France. A closer look at the sources included on the FOI reveals that Italian authors at times used the French language to achieve their own political purposes, and French-speakers living or staying in Italy were meaningfully engaged in the creation and exchange of many of the French-language works found there. The French of Italy website, which appeared alongside the work already being done at Fordham University’s French of England project, expanding the vision of medieval French language work by creating a check list of sources, and aggregating much of the secondary sources associated with the question of French-language writing in Italy.