The Image of the City in Peace and War in a Burgundian manuscript of Jean Froissart's Chronicles

In recent years, scholars have begun to take a fresh interest in the schemes of illumination and decoration found in extant manuscripts of Jean Froissart's Chronicles. For those responsible for the opening volumes of the national editions of the Chronicles published in the second half of the nineteenth century in Belgium and France (respectively, Baron Joseph Kervyn de Lettenhove and Simeon Luce), the manuscript was, first and foremost, the material witness to a particular state of one of the chronicler's texts; study of a manuscript might, in addition, yield codicological or artistic evidence relating to patronage, provenance and history, which could in turn help to shed light on the dating of a redaction or even a family of manuscripts. Sometimes (especially for Kervyn de Lettenhove) the codex attracted comment for its own sake, as an intrinsically beautiful artefact displaying the skills of illuminator or scribe(1). Art historians have been surprisingly slow to lavish attention on what is, in fact, a fascinatingly diverse corpus. In sharp contrast to this relative and unaccountable lack of interest, the current generation of critics, used to exploration of all kinds of image and text association, from bande dessinée to digitised homepage, is beginning to effect a sea-change. Critics working on manuscripts of the Chronicles are now much more preoccupied than ever before with the relations obtaining between text and image. The present essay, which complements a study scheduled for publication in 2000 in a volume arising from a colloquium on the theme Regions and Landscapes held in July 1997 at the International Medieval Congress, Leeds(2), attempts to build on this work(3). Borrowing

Peter Ainsworth University of Liverpool

(1) Jean Froissart, Œuvres, ed. Baron Kervyn de Lettenhove, 29 tomes in 28 vols, Brussels, 1867-1877 (repr. Osnabrück, 1967); Jean Froissart, Chroniques, ed. S. Luce, G. Raynaud, L. and A. Mirot, Paris, 1869 — (in progress; 15 vols so far published, comprising Books I-1II). Both editions incorporate extensive discussions of the manuscript sources, but there is relatively little coverage of illumination. See also J. A. C. Buchon, Collection des Chroniques nationales françaises écrites en langue vulgaire du treizième au seizième siècle, avec notes et éclaircissements: Chroniques de Froissart (Paris, 1824-1829), 1. 1, p. xxv-xxvi. I am grateful to the Departments of French at Liverpool and Edinburgh for supporting my participation in the Edinburgh Colloquium, and to Godfried Croenen for helpful comments on a preliminary draft of this essay. (2) P. Ainsworth, 'A Passion for Townscape. Depictions of the City in a Burgundian Manuscript of Froissart's Chroniques', in P. Ainsworth and T. Scott (eds), Regions and Landscapes. Reality and Imagination in Late Medieval and Early Modern Northern Europe, Bern, 2000, p. 67-109. (3) For a more general approach to the description of images in medieval manuscripts, see Chr. Raynaud, Le commentaire de document figuré en histoire médiévale, Paris, 1997.