Froissart

Special offer for the Tabula Gratulatoria for the festschrift for Prof. Nigel Saul!

The reign of Richard II is well known for its political turmoil as well as its literary and artistic innovations, all areas explored by Professor Nigel Saul during his distinguished career. The present volume interrogates many familiar literary and narrative sources, including works by Froissart, Gower, Chaucer, Clanvow, and the Continuation of the Eulogium Historiarum, along with those less well-known, such as coroner's inquests and gaol delivery proceedings. The reign is also notorious for its larger than life personalities-not least Richard himself. But how was he shaped by other personalities? A prosopographical study of Richard's bishops, a comparison of the literary biographies of his father the Black Prince, and Bertrand du Guesclin, and a reconsideration of Plantagenet family politics, all shed light on this question. Meanwhile, Richard II's tomb reflects his desire to shape a new vision of kingship. Commemoration more broadly was changing in the late fourteenth century, and this volume includes several studies of both individual and communal memorials of various types that illustrate this trend: again, appropriately for an area Professor Saul has made his own.

By the time copies of Froissart's Chronicles were produced in Paris at the start of the fifteenth century, the book trade in the French capital had been a well-established industry for a good while. Clear legislative, organisational and financial structures shaped and regulated the production and sale of books in Paris at this time. Scholars like R. and M. Rouse, who have studied the Paris book trade during this period through a number of important case studies, have highlighted the central role played by the libraires in the whole system. 2 It is clear that many libraires made their way upwards in the trade, starting out as parchmenters, scribes, decorators or miniature painters before achieving the status of libraire or grand libraire. While their essential role as libraire was the sale of both new and second-hand books, and the organisation of the production of new manuscripts through a system of subcontracting, they probably often participated in the actual production of these books whenever they had the time and possessed the necessary skills to do so. 3

Book I of Jean Froissart’s Chroniques has been preserved in several authorial versions but the relative and absolute chronology of these versions has never been satisfactorily determined. The theories proposed by Siméon Luce and the baron Kervyn de Lettenhove contradict each other in several respects. This essay argues that the authorial ‘A’ version has only survived in a fragmentary state but that it must be the first authorial version of the text, to be dated to the year 1381. The ‘Amiens’ version, which can be dated [1384-1391] is the second surviving authorial version, followed by the authorial abridgment, to be dated between the same dates. These are followed by respectively the ‘B’ and ‘C’ versions, both not later than 1399, and respectively after 1391 and 1395. The ‘Rome’ version is the final authorial version of Book I, to be dated after 1404 and not later than 1415. The textual evolution of the Chroniques and the modes of rewriting are illustrated with examples related to some of the military campaigns in Normandy, in particular Edward III’s Normandy campaign of 1346, the duke of Lancaster’s campaign of 1356, and the siege of Cherbourg in 1378-1379.

Les Chroniques de Jean Froissart comptent parmi les plus importants textes en prose de la littérature en moyen français. Le Livre III des Chroniques, qui contient entre autre le compte-rendu du voyage entrepris par le chroniqueur afin de s'informer sur la situation en Languedoc et sur la péninsule ibérique, contient, lui seul, quelques 320.000 mots.

Book of the Duchess have long recognized its general and particular debts to French poetry. Most of the more than twenty French works that scholars have connected to The Book of the Duchess are sources or analogues for Chaucer's diction only, for the very conventional ways in which desire, loss of love and consolation are articulated in poetry that follows the Roman de la Rose. A much smaller number of poems have substantial influence on The Book of the Duchess's content. The opening lines and several other passages translate or closely imitate Jean Froissart's Paradis d'Amour, Guillaume de Machaut's jugement dou Roj de Behaingne, Dit de la Fonteinne Amoureuse and Remede de Fortune seem to have provided the overheard complaint, the narrator's role as amanuensis and consoler, and elements of the Black Knight's complaint against Fortune. Guillaume de Lorris' and Jean de Meun's Romance of the Rose is a more distant yet pervasive inspiration, both independently and through its influence on Machaut and Froissart, providing the The Book of the Duchess with a model for the dream structure, the process of courtship and the representation of emotional states. 1 To this list of substantially influential works should be added Froissart's Dit dou Bleu Chevalier. There are, I believe, two reasons why Chaucer scholars have not yet recognized this influence. 2 First, within Chaucer studies a misapprehension persists about the date of the Bleu Chevalier, secondly, the two texts do not have close verbal parallels despite their extensive structural and thematic parallels. Yet, given the early date that Froissart scholars now assign it, the Bleu Chevalier deserves reconsideration as a source for The Book of the Duchess, a source from which Chaucerians stand to gain not only particular insights into Chaucer's compositional process but a sharper sense of occasional poetry's cultural situation in the F,nglish court of the 1360s. The persistence in Chaucer studies of a discredited late date for Froissart's dit has obscured this line of influence. In his 1870-2 edition of Froissart's poetry, Auguste Scheler implied a date of composition after 1373 for the Bleu Chevalier, 3 but manuscript and internal evidence make it virtually certain that the dit was composed in the 1360s when Froissart was in the service of Philippa of Hainaut, wife of Edward III. Both Wolfgang Clemen, who first noted the very close relationship between the Bleu Chevalier and The Book of the Duchess, and James Wimsatt proposed that Chaucer's work influenced Froissart's. 4 Of the two manuscripts of Froissart's poetic works (Paris, Bibliotheque nationale, iMSS f. fr. 830 and 831) the Bleu Chevalier appears in only one, MS f. 6o MEDIUM Y£,VUM LXL.I fr. 830, which contains several works not present in MS f. fr. 831. 5 Although the order of the eighth and ninth items in MS f. fr. 830 (L'Espinette Amoureuse and Ea Prison A.moureuse) is reversed in MS f. fr. 831, in other respects the order of major works is identical and matches the chronology of composition where it is known from dates Froissart provides internally or from datable historical references in the works. Ernest Hoepffner and Rae S. Badouin have shown that the sections of short poems, too, are arranged chronologically. 6 Anthime Fourrier and Peter Dembowski in their several editions of Froissart's poetry have further endorsed the chronological design of the manuscripts, assigning the edge to MS f. fr. 830 (which contains the Bleu Chevalier). 7 Fourrier estimates a date of 1364 for the Bleu Chevalier, 8 and like Hoepffner and Dembowski considers it a certainty that several short works not named in the Joli Buisson but placed early in the manuscripts, including the Bleu Chevalier, date from Froissart's years in the service of Queen Philippa (1362-9).° During these years Chaucer was in closely related households, beginning with those of Elizabeth of Ulster and Philippa's third son, Lionel, and progressing by 1367 to that of Edward III. 10 In such households Chaucer could have had a range of experiences of Froissart's poetry, from borrowing and acquiring copies, to hearing works performed, to talking about them with their author. The habit of fourteenth-century poets of collecting their individual works into a single livre further sustains an argument for chronological ordering in the Froissart manuscripts. Jacqueline Cerquiglini illustrates from a range of poets' collections the preoccupation with principles of ordering that contribute to establishing a poet's claim to a wider public than the collection's separate items, typically addressed to one or few intimates, could claim. 11 Froissart's poetic collections are framed as a life's work, a history of his accomplishments. The incipit and explicit of MS f. fr. 830 provide the date of earliest composition (1362) and the date of the manuscript's completion (1394); both manuscripts stress Froissart's concern for ordering as the final stage of artistic endeavour: the works are 'fais, ditte, trettie e ordene par venerable et discrete personne sire Jehan Froissart ... Et vous ensengnera ceste table par ordenance les dis tretties et ditties sicom il sont mis.' 12 Froissart's chronological ordering recognizes the occasional origins of his works while at the same time reconstituting them in the new identity of 'ce livre' for connoisseurs who may have no connection with the works' origins. For Chaucerians the conclusions of French textual studies have been obscured by James Wimsatt's argument that the Bleu Chevalier draws on The Book of the Duchess. Wimsatt's valuable contributions to the study of French influences on Chaucer lend weight to his effort to prove Froissart's use of a Chaucerian source. Opposing the claim of Normand Carrier that the Bleu Chevalier was written in Philippa's court, Wimsatt argues that the Froissart manuscripts do not observe chronological order, but the two instances he cites in support are not conclusive. 13 Wimsatt further proposes that Froissart's Bleu Chevalier cannot be a source for The Book of the Duchess because

While depicting jousting tournaments and while glorifying contestants, writers of the Middle Ages bring invaluable information on the way in which confrontations were held. However, the way in which chroniclers give an account of the tournaments is not neutral. Using skillful mechanisms of writing, the chroniclers take part in construction of an idyllic knighthood table. With the Middle Ages, literature and sport both appear with the deep political intentions, and what remains to us is that medieval literature depicts complex sporting phenomenon, structured, very alive and open to the company that carries it.