Jean Froissart and the Fabric of History: Truth, Myth, and Fiction in the Chroniques - Hardcover

Ainsworth, Peter F.

9780198158646: Jean Froissart and the Fabric of History: Truth, Myth, and Fiction in the Chroniques

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198158645 ISBN 13: 9780198158646

Publisher: Clarendon Press, 1991

Froissart's Chroniques still find enthusiastic readers 600 years after they were written. This fresh reading demonstrates that their strength lies as much in their textual richness and complexity as in their appealing subject matter--the exploits of French and English noblemen during the Hundred Years War. Ainsworth explores the literary qualities of the work and considers the range of reader responses to the text: the relative openness, ambivalence, or predictability of the writing; the relationship between narrative, ideology, and gloss; and Froissart's rewriting. The study concludes with an examination of the value and status of his final Book I in the context of the development of the whole work over forty to fifty years of literary and historical activity.

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Review:

`Ainsworth's book is best described as a series of rich, penetrating, elegantly written studies inviting us to look at the Chroniques as text. insworth's study of a historian prey to an increasingly urgent sense of tension between reality and ideal is a most valuable contribution to the rehabilitation of fourteenth-century narrative modes.' Jane H. M. Taylor, Medium Aevum `careful and impressive study' The Ricardian `the book is going to be essential and invaluable for all Froissart scholars and indeed for historians of the period. It is beautifully produced and has a helpful and impressive bibliography which bears witness to the impressive breadth of Ainsworth's reading and scholarship' Peter Noble, French Studies `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 ... this book offers a fresh conceptualization of the "literariness" of the Chroniques and identifies evolutionary stages in both Froissart's discursive practices and his attitudes toward chivalry ... Ainsworth's volume offers a relatively broad audience access to the problems and achievements of recent scholarship while making its own distinguished contribution ... Ainsworth's focus is consistently literary throughout.' Studies in the Age of Chaucer

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