Jean Froissart and the Fabric of History: Truth, Myth, and Fiction in the Chroniques by Peter F. Ainsworth (review)

REVIEWS PETER F. AINSWORTH.jean Froissart andthe Fabric a/History: Truth, Myth, and Fiction in the Chroniques. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Pp. xvi, 329. $79.00. One reads and rereads Peter Ainsworth's densely textured volume on Froissart's Chroniques with a growing sense of gratitude for the riches it contains. The fruit of more than twenty years of study, this book offers a fresh conceptualization of the "literariness" of the Chroniques and identi­ fies evolutionary stages in both Froissart's discursive practices and his attitudestowardchivalry. The volumeconcludeswith a climactic reading of the Rome manuscript ofbook 1 ofthe Chroniques, probably Froissart's last work, as a layered text in which Edward Ill's nostalgically memorialized reign becomes a mirror for princes of the late-fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The first full-length study in English of Froissart's literary achievement in the Chroniques since F. S. Shears's monograph of 1930, Ainsworth's volume offers a relatively broad audience access to the prob­ lems and achievements of recent scholarship while making its own dis­ tinguished contribution. No study ofthis kind could succeed without a reconsideration ofhow to define whatmakes the Chroniques a part ofthe canon ofliterature as well as historiography. The limitations of the nineteenth-century emphasis on character and description are only more obvious than the relative inflex­ ibility ofthe modern distinction between medieval historical discourse and medieval romance manner, or the inadequacy of stylistic analyses alone, however brilliant. Drawing on the work ofsuch contemporary theorists as Genette, Todorov, Iser, and Lodge, Ainsworth classifies the Chroniques as a ''potentially literary" text ("Introduction," p. 16), one that in different degrees at different times invites a regime de lecture appropriate to one or another literary genre, procedure, or device. The fundamental charac­ teristics of fully literary texts provide the criteria for this classification and for the discrimination ofdegrees ofliterariness. Such texts, defined by "the presence of a high quotient of (patterned) indeterminacy, inevitably ac­ companied by a proportionate increase in the range of potential connota­ tions" (pp. 15-16), invite the reader to engage in "hypothesis-building" and the tracing of"theme constellations" by reading "in all directions" for recurrences, contrasts, preoccupations, etc. 147 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Noting the coincidence of these concepts, most of them intended to elucidate modern texts, with the concerns of medievalists such as Vinaver (typology of texts) andJauss (horizon of expectations), Ainsworth asserts that we are now in the fortunate position of having acquired tools for the study ofqualities that were always there in Froissart's text. To the extent that the value of a theory can be established by the practice it makes possible, Ainsworth's readings of the Chroniques richly justify his recourse to this understanding of the literariness of Froissart's text. After tracing briefly the different paths taken by chronicle, history, and romance in the two hundred years before Froissart, Ainsworth proceeds (in chapter 1) to reconstruct the evolution ofFroissart's own concept ofhistoire by explicating his autocritique in the much-debated Prologue to the A manuscript ofbook 1 (as designated by Simeon Luce in the edition of the Societe de l'Histoire de France). Ainsworth believes that the "lost" chronicle referred to in this Prologue, which Froissart presented to Queen Phillippa in 1362, was inverseand thatFroissartabandonedthat workbecausehe was converted toJean Le Bel's preference for prose as the vehicle for historical narrative and to Le Bel's model ofextensive inquiry to establish the truth of event. Froissart did not adopt Le Bel's ideal ofconcision, however, but over time became ever more committed to the idea that histoire, as contrasted with chronicle, required "writing things out-at length" (p. 49). This practice, uniquely Froissartian among fourteenth-century chroniclers, pro­ duced the "proto-literary" text: one in which, at certain points, "an op­ tional 'bifurcation' becomes possible:... certain textual developments al­ low themselves to be read according to the regime of narrative history, or according to other [more literary] regimes" (p. 49). Emphasizing the range of kinds of narrative, of varying degrees of sophistication, to be found at such points of bifurcation, Ainsworth ana­ lyzes (in chapter 4) a number of stories dealing with freebooters, the capture of castles...