Award-winning book on France and England’s aggressively intimate relationship

The quintessentially English author Chaucer is more French than most of us realise, argues Ardis Butterfield (UCL English) in her awardwinning book The Familiar Enemy (Oxford University Press). Professor Butterfield has won the 2010 Gapper Prize for her rare illumination of the literary aspect of the Hundred Years War. She suggests that a modern understanding of what 'English' might have meant during this turbulent period cannot be separated from 'French'. Professor Butterfield elaborates below on the far-reaching implications this has today for our understanding of the English and French peoples, and their languages. ?The relationship between England and France, soeurs ennemies , has been praised, mocked, fought for and resisted, ceaselessly discussed, and self-consciously lived, for longer than any other Western axis. It makes an irresistible claim to be studied for what it can tell us about nation. For  over a millennium, in a stable geographical tension either side of a narrow sleeve of sea, the English and the French have provided a model of how people identify with one another while also preserving an autonomous space.