Fashioned by Use: Jacques Bellot’s Rules and its Successors

Abstract

The sixteenth-century Huguenot émigré Jacques Bellot played a seminal role in the history of English and French language tuition, and is remembered for composing some of the first descriptive grammars for learners of both languages. His methods remained in use throughout the seventeenth century after being incorporated into the often- reprinted Grammaire angloise (1625). This essay considers a previously undiscussed manuscript copy of Bellot’s Rules containing the Perfect Understanding of the French Tongue (1566?) for evidence of his early attempts to teach French to members of Sir Thomas Wroth’s family. The Rules provides new insights into how Bellot and his printers adapted the content and parallel-text layout in his subsequent printed manuals to create more efficient aids to language learning.