The Online Froissart Project

History, Modern Languages

Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), The Leverhulme Trust, The British Academy

Still Image/Graphics, Text

MySQL, TEI, XML, SGML via WP8, Virtual Vellum, OF Tools

The Manuscript Tradition of Froissart´s Chronicles The size of the manuscript tradition of Jean Froissart´s Chronicles is substantial. The Chronicles are a very long text with each of the four Books containing several hundreds of thousands of words. Book I is by far the longest part, containing about 500,000 words; Book II contains about 270,000; Book III about 320,000 and Book IV about 300,000. The number of manuscripts is also considerable, with over 150 surviving manuscript volumes. Some of these contain more than one Book, most only a single Book or part of one. The four Books do not survive in equal numbers: 60 manuscripts of Book I are known, 32 of Book II, 24 of Book III, and only 21 of Book IV. There are also 3 manuscripts of Jean Froissart´s Chronique de Flandres, 9 manuscripts containing medieval abridgments of one or more Books of the Chronicles, and several manuscripts and early prints with medieval or post-medieval translations of the Chronicles into different European languages (Dutch, English, Italian, Spanish, Danish). Although there are several incomplete and fragmentary manuscripts, the total number of pages in these manuscripts still counts in the tens of thousands and the total number of words contained in these witnesses in the tens of millions. Given the considerable size of the manuscript corpus it was therefore paramount to focus the project's effort on the delivery of a selection of material that would be useful for scholars and other users, while still making the most of the materials already available to the project. Although the projects on whose material the Online Froissart partly draws had a number of different aims and objectives and therefore concentrated on different aspects of the manuscript tradition, many of them were concerned in one way or another with the first three Books of the Chronicles. This is also the part of the Chronicles where the variation amongst the manuscript text is greatest because each of these Books exists in two or more versions. A decision was therefore reached to focus the Online Froissart in the first place on the manuscript tradition of Books I-III and provide users with a minimum of information on each of the 112 surviving manuscripts, including a sample transcription. We also decided to include sample transcriptions for the first edition of the Chronicles, printed by Anthoine Vérard at the end of the fifteenth century, and therefore contemporary with some of the younger manuscripts. In its current version the Online Froissart therefore leaves aside the 21 manuscripts of Book IV of the Chronicles as well as the manuscripts of the other related texts (Chronique de Flandres, abridgments, translations). The decision to concentrate on the authorial versions of Books I-III was also justified because the digital reproductions available to the project team, which are an important aspect of the online resource, include a number of illuminated manuscripts covering only Books I-III. Core components of the Online Froissart One of the core elements of the Online Froissart is the parallel sample transcriptions (XML-TEI format), covering the same passages across all available manuscripts for each Book. These provide the user with valuable material for carrying out detailed comparisons between the manuscripts. For Book III and part of Book I these samples were created for Godfried Croenen´s research into the reconstruction of the links between the surviving manuscripts. During the AHRC-funded period more work was carried out on Book I and samples for Book II were also created. To complement the text samples transcribed from each manuscript, the Online Froissart also includes a number of transcriptions in XML of complete manuscripts which together cover Books I-III. These include transcriptions made in the context of earlier research. The complete transcription of the New York Morgan Library M.804 manuscript originated as part of Rob Sanderson´s Liverpool PhD thesis (Book I) and Peter Ainsworth´s edition for the Lettres gothiques series (Book II). The transcription of Besançon ms. 864 (Book I and the start of Book II) was originally part of Valentina Mazzei´s Sheffield PhD. The Book III section of Besançon ms. 865 was first transcribed by Peter Ainsworth for his editions of Book III. The transcriptions of Brussels ms. II 88, Kortrijk ms. 329 and Oxford Laud. misc. ms. 745 were created by Godfried Croenen as part of his research into the earliest manuscripts of Book I of the Chronicles. Godfried Croenen´s and Peter Ainsworth´s research into the early fifteenth-century illustrated manuscripts of the Chronicles was supported by the digitisation of manuscripts at Besançon (mss. 864-865), Toulouse (ms. 511), Stonyhurst (ms. 1), Brussels (mss. II 88, ms. IV 251) and Paris (mss. fr. 2663-2664). These manuscripts belong to a group copied and decorated in Paris in the first quarter of the 15th century, several of which are by scribes and artists whose work was overseen by the libraire Pierre de Liffol. They are amongst the earliest, most reliable and most beautifully decorated manuscripts containing Books I-III to have survived. The fact that Besançon Municipal Library was prepared to allow the project to use on its website the images of its manuscripts — a substantial part of which had already been transcribed by Mazzei and Ainsworth — made the Besançon volumes a logical cornerstone of the Online Froissart. During the project the text of Book II was transcribed from Besançon 865 to complement Mazzei´s and Ainsworth´s editions. Because much current research into the Chronicles relies on the scholarly editions of the Société de l'Histoire de France and Académie royale de Belgique, it was decided to provide users also with complete transcriptions of some of the base manuscripts used for these editions, which are amongst the textually most important witnesses of the Chronicles. These include Leiden, ms. VGGF 9-2 (Book II), Berlin, ms. Rehdiger 3 (Book III), and Paris, ms. fr. 2650 (Book III), as well as Paris, ms. fr. 5006 for those sections of Book II absent from the Leiden manuscript. The inclusion of these transcriptions will allow users of the Online Froissart to access the whole corpus of transcriptions starting from the edition references (page and chapter numbers, feature still to be released). Substantial partial transcriptions of the opening sections of Brussels ms. IV 251 (SHF chapters 0-256) and Stonyhurst College ms. 1 (SHF chapters 0-137) were also made during the funded project period to complement the digital reproductions of these witnesses. The Online Froissart allows word-by-word comparisons of the various transcriptions. The detailed collation data for this feature is produced with Peter Robinson's Collate software (collation data is currently only available for parts of Books I and II). Because of the centrality of Besançon mss. 864-865 to the project, they were used as the basis for the new English translation, another core component of the resource. The translation by Keira Borrill covers episodes carefully selected from Books I, II and III of the Chronicles, intended to provide students of history with improved access to chapters that are amongst the most important narrative sources for the Hundred Years’ War. Keeping as close as possible to the sense of Froissart’s text, the translations aim none the less to appeal to a wide audience of scholars and enthusiasts. In order to contextualise the manuscripts and help users with the interpretation of the text, new historical commentaries on the text and on the names mentioned in the Chronicles were created in the course of the project. These are supplemented by a number of scholarly articles and commentaries on various aspects of the manuscripts themselves and on the historical period.

Open Access

Tagged Image File Format (TIFF), XML, SGML

Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS), Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS), Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)

Ainsworth, Peter, and Michael Meredith, ‘e-Science for medievalists: options, challenges, solutions and opportunities’, Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol 3 number 4 (2009), issue on e-Science for the Arts and Humanities (ed. S. Dunn and T. Blanke), 12 p.

‘Editing, e-Science and exhibitions’, in Essays in later medieval French Literature. The legacy of Jane H.M. Taylor, edited by Rebecca Dixon, Durham Modern Languages Series, Manchester University Press (Manchester, 2010), pp. 107-25. ISBN 978 0 7190 8192 7