Last year's lecture, "Speaking to the 'simple folk': a medieval literary art", had an identifiable and circumscribed project. The starting point was simple: unlike other civilizations where the learned language, even if no longer spoken fluently, remained the sole language of written culture for centuries, the vernacular languages of the medieval West were written down very early on. Their literature quickly developed alongside Latin and soon competed victoriously with it, except in the pure domain of thought and knowledge. This rapid rise to the status of languages of culture, and of written culture, was largely due to the need for clerics - who, with their knowledge of Latin, held a monopoly on writing - to use them to evangelize the mass of the faithful, the "simple folk". The earliest preserved monuments of our literature bear witness to this concern. It is present at the very roots of this literature, however elitist it may wish to be on the other hand.
The real question, then, is not why literature in the vernacular is aimed at the simple folk, but why literature in the vernacular is not only aimed at them, but claims to be aimed specifically at a restricted, refined milieu. It's not a question of religious versus secular literature, as the very notion of secular literature had little meaning in the Middle Ages; it's a question of the place of the simple folk in this literature, which initially used their language only to address them.
This is why the lecture begun last year under the title "Parler aux 'simples gens' : un art littéraire médiéval" (Speaking to 'simple people': a medieval literary art) is being extended this year under the title: "Parler aux simples, parler des simples. Awareness of simplicity in medieval literary art".