Dictionnaire du français médiéval ( Dictionary of Old and Middle French)

The Dictionnaire du français médiéval (the Old and Middle French dictionary) was published in 2015 by Les Belles Lettres in Paris. This dictionary contains definitions of the old and middle French lexicon in the modern French language. Copies are held in the Komaba Library, available for viewing for those who are interested. There are many single-volume dictionaries of archaic Japanese lexicon, but for the French where it concerns the old to middle-ages language (referring to northern French after 842 A.D. up to the 15th century; note that it also includes the French language used in England, Italy and the Holy Land  during the same period), there are only series of multi-volume dictionaries. No decent single-volume Old French dictionaries exist. Thus, this dictionary has been created to fill this gap, commissioned at the end of 2007, taking five and a half years for completion. There is of course a limit to what one individual can do, and I imagine there are some people who wish, on seeing this dictionary, to have a better one. It would be an honor if this dictionary served as a prompt for them to go on to produce better versions to replace my work.
 
In making this dictionary, I used other sources such as the 10-volume Frédéric Godefroy version, 11-volume Tobler-Lommatzsch and 25-volume Walther von Wartburg, but I maintained a critical approach to the existing dictionaries. I refrained from simply copying examples from them, and I referred to the original sources, making modifications if necessary to the final proof. I removed ghost words as much as possible, and added words and usages from various literary works and historical sources (not only so-called literature, but also from a diversity of texts in medicine, astronomy and other fields of interest), that other scholars so far have overlooked. Where words and expressions are exclusive to certain regions, these are indicated as such. This is information that has not been included in major conventional dictionaries. My dictionary thus may provide certain hypotheses on the information that cannot be found in multiple volumes of dictionaries. Sources of these hypotheses, such as journal articles, are also indicated, so that readers may trace back to the sources if necessary. This being a single-volume dictionary, there is a limit to the number of entries and examples included. However, with 56,212 entries on 3,500 pages, this work hopefully serves its purpose to those who are interested in old and middle French, and the French language in general, from across many fields. I assume that there are those who wonder why not Europeans or Americans, but a Japanese was commissioned to produce a French dictionary. Originally, one of my French professors, Gilles Roques (lexicology in old and middle French) was commissioned, but he did not produce any material after 10 years into the contract. The publisher in indignation terminated the contract with him and searched for someone to complete the work, when Professor Michel Zink (French literature of the Middle Ages) singled me out for the task. After the publishing of this dictionary, I asked Prof. Zink if he had no one else in mind, and he answered that there might have been those who could tackle this work in a team, but I was the only one who would be able to complete the task alone in a short period.
 

(Written by MATSUMURA Takeshi, Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences / 2017)