The Online Froissart (review)

The massive French Chroniques by Jean Froissart, covering three quarters of the fourteenth century in four books, are an invaluable and well-known source for historians of the Hundred Years’ War and Late Middle Ages. They are also a challenge to critical editors. Their tradition is both overwhelming and complicated: overwhelming because of the considerable number of manuscripts, and complicated because of the different versions of the text borne by the witnesses.

The Online Froissart project aims at providing scholars with a comprehensive resource for the study of the Chroniques. Its holistic approach is particularly interesting: together with the transcription of the text according to a number of witnesses—which is the core of the project—it offers facsimiles of some manuscripts (currently seven complete digital surrogates are available) and information on non-textual features like commentaries or miniatures from the manuscripts, codicological descriptions, and even essays. Students and scholars unfamiliar with medieval French are not forgotten, with the English translation of a selection of chapters and quick access to prominent and well-known episodes of the Chroniques. In the original text some place names and personal names are even hyperlinked to articles that provide explanations and context. Most importantly for a digital edition, the readers / users benefit from a number of tools and features that improve their experience of the Online Froissart: they can look up a word in the ATILF’s Dictionnaire du Moyen Français directly from the transcription, visually compare side-by-side the transcription of several witnesses, perform powerful searches with options to specify their scope, and even experiment with an automatic collation of chosen witnesses. The combination of these features makes the Online Froissart not only a resource, but a full-fledged research tool on the Chroniques.

Out of more than 150 extant manuscripts transmitting the Chroniques, the editors chose to focus on Books 1 to 3, the most complicated part of the tradition, leaving aside Book 4, which is transmitted by a smaller number of witnesses and has a more stable text. The project in its current state (version 1.3, published May 2012) already offers information on all of the 113 manuscripts transmitting Books 1–3: fourteen manuscripts with a “complete and edited transcription” (seven for Book 1 of the Chroniques in two versions, four for Book 2, and three for Book 3), and 105 “sample or partial transcriptions” of manuscripts (53 for Book 1 in five versions, 31 for Book 2, and 21 for Book 3), complete with a sample transcription of two early printed editions. According to the description of the latest version, 4,364,000 words have now been transcribed from 15,162 manuscript pages. A detailed codicological description is offered for eleven manuscripts, and the projects aims at creating one for each of the 113 witnesses. The editors took good care to explain their editorial principles, and the use of state-of-the-art technology (all the transcriptions and translations are encoded in TEI P5 XML) combined with a clean, sober web design are other praiseworthy features of the Online Froissart project. The use of XML TEI encoding ensures that, over the years, it will be possible to migrate the textual data from system to system and from software to software, and even to improve the processing of the data with future developments of the Digital Humanities.

The project itself has involved an impressive number of collaborators over the years: 31 are listed by name. Apart from the work done specifically for the project, it is an interesting example of synergy between different preexisting tools (Virtual Vellum, Collate . . .) and material (transcriptions) brought together. This is an inspiring example of collaborative work to produce a comprehensive, all-in-one resource.

The Online Froissart is undoubtedly a must for any Froissart scholar as well as for any digital humanist interested in the digital edition of works with a large tradition. A non-specialist only interested in reading the Chroniques, however, might feel a bit overwhelmed by...