Froissart: Historian ed. by J.J.N. Palmer (review)

REVIEWS and argue for later dates for some. David summarizes that it is hazardous to see historical events mirrored in lines that are later taken to be common­ places. Regarding sources, David claims that the increase of knowledge has created doubts regarding attributions. He admits that the moral poems echo phrases and longer passages but notes that "some of the lines for which specific sources have been proposed turn out to be common topics, the stock-in-trade of ancient and medieval authors." "Chaucer's mind," according to David, "is stocked with the words of other poets and with rhetorical phrases, but in these works [The Minor Poems] he does not seem to be consulting his library or following a source." This edition is handsomely produced by the University of Oklahoma Press in the same beautiful design as the inaugural volume of the Variorum Chaucer, which was the winner of the 1979 Southern Books Award for design. The paper used for the printing of The Minor Poems, Part One, is seventy-pound Warren's 1854 and has an effective life of at least three hundredyears. Scholars and seriousstudents will find this well-researched and carefully edited volume cum notis variorum most useful for future research upon Chaucer's somewhat neglected lyrics. PAULM. CLOGAN North Texas State University J.]. N. PALMER, ed., Froissart: Historian. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer; Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981. Pp. xi, 203. Maps and tables. £20; $47.50. The Chronicles ofJean Froissart (ca. 1333-1410) are the most ambitious and colorful of later-medieval chronicles, and through the translations of Lord Berners (1523-25) and ThomasJohnes (1803-10), which have often been reprinted in whole or part, they have long been popular in English. For Chaucerians they have the particular interest of recording Chaucer's presence in an embassy to France in 1377 (see Chaucer Life-Records, pp. 49-51), the only time Chaucer is mentioned in a contemporary chronicle. But although Berners andJohnes give us good translations, the texts they used are sometimes faulty or deficient, each represents only a 183 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER single version of a much revised work, and there is no amply annotated edition of these or any other English translation.Even the two principal editions in French, that ofKervyn de Lettenhove (1867-77) and that ofthe Societe del'histoirede France(initiatedin 1869 by Simeon Luce and still in progress), chiefly present a single version apiece, and Froissart scholarship has made many recent discoveries that they do not incorporate.Froissart: Historian is the first book devoted to the Chronicles as a whole.The work of ten able English, French, Dutch, and American scholars, it should be consulted not only by historians but by anyone who cites or even reads Froissart. ].]. N.Palmer's introduction traces Froissart's enormous influence: until Kervyn de Lettenhove and the SHF edition, Froissart's accounts of the fourteenth century went largely unquestioned, in outline and detail, by British and Continental historians alike.But since then "attacks on [his] accuracy and veracity have become legion and are scattered in scores of periodicals and hundreds ofbooks on dozens ofdifferent subjects" (p.5). Froissart's account of the political conflict in England between Richard II and the Appellants in 1386-88, for example, is vivid and exciting but entirely unreliable, owing in large measure to his use ofthe literary device of interlacing.And Manly showed the confusions and inaccuracies of the account of Chaucer's embassy. But Froissart's mistakes continue to be perpetuated by the unwary.Recently both Barbara Tuchman (inA Distant Mirror) and, quite gleefully, John Gardner (in The Life and Times of Chaucer) follow that version ofthe Chronicles that tells how, in 1370, the Black Prince ruthlessly slaughtered the inhabitants of Limoges. They overlook another version in which the slaughter is considerably less, and, as previous historians have demonstrated and as Richard Barber also does in the presentvolume(pp.33-34),it isprobablethatfew civilians were infact killed.We are almost in the paradoxical situation of having to distrust Froissart unless he is corroborated by independent testimony-in which case his testimony would not really be necessary. Palmer says that "it is hoped...