Emeritus Professor Peter Ainsworth

email: p.f.ainsworth@sheffield.ac.uk

Major research project

The AHRC-funded Online Froissart (interactive electronic edition of Jehan Froissart’s 14th-century Chroniques)

www.hrionline.ac.uk/onlinefroissart (v. 1.4, 30/11/12)

This large-scale research resource based on the Middle French Chronicles of Jehan Froissart covers his narratives of the Hundred Years' War (1325-1404) and opens a window onto the social, political and military history of the period. Teams at the Universities of Sheffield and Liverpool have transcribed 113 manuscripts (some completely, others partially); the resource is updated annually.

Over 7 million words of Middle French have been recorded, lemmatised and converted into searchable online glossaries thanks to a British Academy-CNRS project bringing scholars from the Universities of Sheffield, Edinburgh, St Andrews and Plymouth into close partnership with lexicographers and programmers at the Université de Lorraine (Nancy 2) responsible for the Dictionnaire du Moyen Français. Users of the Online Froissart can access complete DMF entries from any lemma in a transcription. In exchange, a large body of our own lexical material has been made freely available to the DMF. Scholars of the early modern French language can find this material on the DMF web site (via ‘glossaires’, and under “FRO”). The material has also been incorporated into the Frantexte database.

Collational tools and a specially designed search engine have helped us to uncover new knowledge concerning relationships between key manuscript witnesses of the Chroniques. A better understanding of the overall manuscript tradition and textual evolution of this great work has been reached during the lifetime of the project, and the research continues to date

A new translation by Keira Borrill into modern English of key chapters from all three Books of the Chroniques is proving popular with graduate students and medievalist scholars with limited or no Middle French. Background essays provide introductions to the period and to the Chroniques, and more than 200,000 personal and place name have been glossed.

Application of the latest e-Tools for medievalists has yielded a new understanding of palaeographical issues such as palimpsests and scribal ‘fingerprints’. High-resolution facsimiles of up to five manuscript volumes can be compared together on screen using our external Virtual Vellum viewer. Collaborations with historians of the book and manuscript illumination have generated fresh discoveries about the identities and practices of the artists and workshops responsible for the books, and about late medieval booksellers and their methods.

Impact

Three international exhibitions (Royal Armouries 2007-08, Musée de l’Armée 2010, and Musée national du Moyen Age-Château de Pau, 2011-12) followed on from the project. Visitor feedback uncovered a vibrant interest in the Middle Ages and the Hundred Years' War on the part of people as young as seven and as old as ninety, kindled by the exhibits, interactive software and narratives (evidence from questionnaires, interviews and Visitors' Books).

A major challenge for the exhibition designers was to devise ways of attracting and engaging with wider, non-academic publics. Working alongside curators and seeing how they reacted to our more academic content and materials was immensely stimulating, as was the process of finding efficient and lively ways to articulate our scholarship to these wider publics.

Online galleries are viewable at:

cbers.shef.ac.uk/exhibitions/leeds/

cbers.shef.ac.uk/exhibitions/paris/

Related publications by Peter Ainsworth, 2007-present

• ‘Au-delà des apparences: Jean Froissart et l’affaire de la dame de Carrouges’, in R. Kosinski et J. Blanchard, eds, Le droit et son écriture au Moyen Age, CRMH, 23 p. (forthcoming, July 2013)
• Royalty Reflected in the Chronicles of Froissart’, Chapter 10, Every Inch a King. Comparative Studies on Kings and Kingship in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds, edited by Lynette Mitchell and Charles Melville, “Rulers and Elites. Comparative Studies in Governance”, series editor Jeroen Duindam, volume 2, Brill (Leiden and Boston, 2013), pp. 215-43. ISBN 978-90-04-22897-9
• ‘Collections: Editing, Exhibitions, and e-Science Initiatives’, in Collections in Context. The Organization of Knowledge and Community in Europe, edited by Karen Fresco and Anne D. Hedeman, The Ohio State University Press (Columbus, 2011), pp. 13-29. ISBN 978-0-8142-1171-7
• (with Michael Meredith) ‘Breaching the Strongroom: a Pervasive Informatics Approach to Working with Medieval Manuscripts’, Proceedings of the KMIS 2011 International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing, Joachim Felipe and Kecheng Liu, eds (Setúbal, Portugal, 2011), pp. 264-71. ISBN 978-989-8425-81-2
• ‘Le Fébus de Froissart’, Gaston Fébus. Prince Soleil 1331-1391. Musée de Cluny — musée national du Moyen Age, Paris, 30 novembre 2011-5 mars 2012, Musée national du Château de Pau, 17 mars-17 juin 2012. Editions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux-Grand Palais (Paris, 2011), pp. 44-51. ISBN 978-2-7118-5877-4
• ‘Digital Attraction: from the real to the virtual in manuscript studies’, Forum: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate journal of Culture and the Arts, 12, Authenticity (May, 2011), 14 p. ISSN 1749-9771
• ‘Editing, e-Science and exhibitions’, in Essays in Later Medieval French Literature. The Legacy of Jane H.M. Taylor, ed. Rebecca Dixon, “Durham Modern Languages Series”, Manchester University Press (Manchester, 2010), pp. 107-25. ISBN 978-0-7190-8192-7
• ‘Les familles royales dans les Chroniques de Jean Froissart: entre texts et images’, Familles royales. Vie publique, vie privée aux XIVe et XVe siècles, sous la direction de Christiane Raynaud, Publications de l’Université de Provence, coll. “Le temps de l’histoire” (Aix-en-Provence, 2010), pp. 19-37. ISBN 978-2-85399-751-5
• ‘Froissart, Jean’, and ‘Heraldry’, in Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle, ed. R.G. Dunphy, Brill (Leiden and Boston, 2010), pp. 642-5 and 773-5. ISBN 978-9004-184-640
• ‘Jean Froissart et la Guerre de Cent Ans’, and (with Inès Villela-Petit) ‘Deux cycles d’illustrations des Chroniques de Froissart comparés’ Art de l'enluminure, Arts et Métiers, déc 2009-fév 2010, no 31, Editions Faton (Paris, 2009), pp. 2-13 and 46-89. ISSN 0758413 X
• ‘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. ISSN 1938-4122
• ‘Technologies nouvelles, manuscrits virtuels. La guerre de Cent Ans à travers les Chroniques de Jean Froissart’, in Medieval Historical Discourses. Essays in Honour of Professor Peter S. Noble, ed. Marianne J. Ailes, Anne Lawrence-Mathers, Françoise H.M. Le Saux, Reading Medieval Studies XXXIV (Reading, 2008), pp. 21-34. ISBN 0-7049-9891-2
• ‘Les représentations de villes dans les manuscrits de Froissart : d’un codex à l’autre’, Villes en guerre, XIVe-XVe siècles, sous la direction de Christiane Raynaud, Publications de l’Université de Provence, coll. « Le temps de l’histoire » (Aix-en-Provence, 2008), pp. 13-42. ISBN 978-2-85399-691-4
• Jean Froissart, Chroniques, Troisième Livre. MS 865 de la Bibliothèque Municipale de Besançon, ed. Peter Ainsworth, tome 1, Editions Droz, “Textes Littéraires Français” (Geneva, 2007). ISBN 978-2-600-01100-6
• Affective Communication in Design. Challenges for Researchers. Proceedings of a conference organised by The White Rose University Consortium, Leeds, UK June 21-22 2007, Taylor & Francis, CoDesign vol 3, supplement 1 (2007), 1-2, Guest Editors Tom Childs, Chris Rust, Peter Wright, Peter Ainsworth, Jim Nobbs. 210 p. ISBN 978-0-415-44899-4