David Trotter Annual Memorial Lecture

The 2021 David Trotter Memorial Lecture was delivered by Professor Daron Burrows of Oxford University on Thursday 28 October 2021. This was the fifth David Trotter Memorial Lecture, hosted by the Department of Modern Languages at Aberystwyth. Unlike previous years, this lecture was held on-line, making the event available to a wider public. The recording of the lecture is available for everyone to view.

Professor Burrows, Fellow of St Peter’s College, is Professor of Medieval French at Oxford University. He is Hon. Secretary of the Anglo-Norman Text Society (where he has published multiple volumes) and Chair of the Advisory Board of the Anglo-Norman Dictionary. His lecture, ‘On Editing Anglo-Norman Texts: The Verse Psalter, for example’, demonstrated his profound expertise in editing medieval texts written in the Anglo-Norman language – the variant of French that was used in medieval Britain and that pervaded so much of British culture. Professor Burrows’s talk provided a fascinating insight to the working methods and to the decisions facing editors of medieval texts; his lecture is of interest to both specialists and those with no prior knowledge of the field.

Professor David Trotter was a leading international authority on French language and lexicography, a former president of the Société de Linguistique Romane and a corresponding member of the Paris-based Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. A graduate of Queen’s College Oxford, he joined Aberystwyth University in 1993 and was Professor of French and Head of the Department of Modern Languages for over two decades. He was Chief Editor of the Anglo-Norman Dictionary between 2002 and 2015.