Jean Froissart’s Chroniques cover the period from around 1326 to around 1400 and are the single most important medieval prose narrative about the first part of the Hundred Years’ War. More than 150 manuscript volumes containing the Chronicles have survived in more than 30 different libraries across Europe and North America. Of the four Books of the Chronicles the first three exist in substantially different versions.
The manuscript tradition of the Chroniques is a particularly rich quarry for research into many aspects of the period (history, art history, book production, literature), but research has to date been hampered by difficulties in comparing the original materials dispersed to libraries across different countries. The Online Froissart offers access to the manuscript tradition of the first three Books of Froissart’s Chronicles. It delivers complete or partial transcriptions of all 113 surviving manuscripts containing these Books, a new translation into modern English providing readers with an accessible way of exploring chapters selected from the first three Books, several complete high-resolution reproductions of illuminated manuscript copies, and a range of secondary materials (codicological descriptions, name/place index, historical commentaries, textual commentaries, scholarly essays, a glossary and some commentaries on the illustrations).
The Online Froissart also provides a number of advanced tools with which to unlock the riches of the resource. These include a collation tool allowing word-by-word comparisons, a search engine for simple and complex queries, a transcription viewing mode allowing users to go straight to definition entries in the online Dictionnaire du Moyen Français, and a dedicated manuscript viewer for manipulating the electronic facsimiles.
Website
Duration: 1st October 2007 – 30th April 2010
Project Team
- Prof. Peter Ainsworth (Principal Investigator – University of Sheffield)
- Godfried Croenen (Co-Investigator – University of Liverpool)
- Valentina Mazzei (University of Sheffield)
- Hartley Miller (University of Liverpool)
- Katariina Närä (University of Sheffield)
- Natasha Romanova (University of Liverpool)
- Rob Sanderson (University of Liverpool)
- Jamie McLaughlin (Developer – The Digital Humanities Institute)
- Dr Michael Meredith (Developer – The Digital Humanities Institute)