The 11th century is the starting point for researching what is now comfortably termed French literature, if one has decided to conduct a study of it. The actual manuscripts which we possess are seldom of older date than the century subsequent to this. French Translation of these manuscripts has revealed that even then, the language was not pure French that we know today. However, it will be right to claim that as early as the 12th century French, as a set of grammatical and lexical rules, had become a language of frequent and variable use. For many centuries previous to this, literature had been composed in France, or by natives of that country, using the term France in its full modern acceptation; but until the 9th century, if not later, the written language of France, so far as we know, was Latin; and despite the practice of not a few literary historians, it does not seem reasonable to notice Latin writings in a history of French literature. What makes such an interpretation so attractive is the time when contemporary French bore the name Lingua Romana Rustica but in the subsequent years it shaped up so that it could become an independent language. A language bearing the name of Lingua Romana, which was different from Latin and Teutonic, appeared in the 7th century and lawyers would frequently use it from then on. More recently, these documents have been translated from Latin to French by a Legal Translator service. A few written signs have remained from the time when French was a young language. They can be traced back to the period between the 9th and 11th centuries and are of various nature. With The Oaths of Strassburg (the oldest document) the two brothers Charles the Bald and Louis the German became allies.
Probably the one nation that did not succeed in adjusting to the new literary and cultural norms introduced by Italy and France throughout Europe were the Germans. The same cannot be said about their neighbors – the Scandinavians and the Latin-influenced English. Rather, their literary history has been a struggle for independent expression, a constant warring against outside forces, even when the latter – like the influence of English literature in the 18th century and of Scandinavian at the close of the 19th – were hailed as friendly and not hostile. One of the most fruitful periods in the history of German literature is probably the Reformation. Martin Luther, Germany’s greatest man in this age of intellectual new-birth, demands a larger share of attention in a survey of literature than his religious and ecclesiastical activity would in itself justify, if only because the literary activity of the age cannot be regarded apart from him. Instead of Latin Luther translated the Bible into German which influenced tremendously both the church and the whole German culture. Luther thoroughly realized that a German Translation to English of the Bible would earn him immortality so he made all possible effort so that he could produce an entirely German work. It was important that the dialect into which the Bible was translated should be comprehensible over as wide an area as possible of the German-speaking world. Following the publication of the translation of the Bible the Saxon chancery developed further and shaped up the contemporary German language.
