Peter Ainsworth

Virtual manuscripts for an enhanced museum and web experience ‘living manuscripts’

Due to preservation and conservation issues, manuscripts are normally kept in research libraries far from public gaze. On rare occasions, visitors can see these priceless objects, typically separated from them by a sealed case, with only a fixed double page spread visible from a manuscript that may contain hundreds of folios. This restricts the amount of knowledge offered by these books. This paper proposes the creation of virtual manuscripts as exhibits in their own right in a museum context, and as part of a web-based virtual learning environment offering visitors the unique opportunity of engaging with the manuscripts, providing further possibilities for accessing the heritage and cultural information contained in them. A database supplying information about and from the manuscripts, held in a virtual environment, creates the illusion of their “real” presence and materiality. ‘Living Manuscripts’ aims to stimulate and encourage engagement with vulnerable materials via an innovative virtual experience.

Froissardian Perspectives on Late-Fourteenth-Century Society

Jean Froissart (c.1337-c.1404) was the author of one of the great historical enterprises of the later Middle Ages. His Chronicles2 span almost the whole of the fourteenth century, concluding with the accession of Henry IV. Selective in viewpoint and emphasis as they undoubtedly are, they embrace many of the major political and military events of that period, and address at least some of its more serious social disturbances. This chapter3 focuses on the principal ways in which the discourse of the chronicle – as Froissart practised it – presents to the reader a lively but selective vision of social order, structure and hierarchy. A second aim is to show how Froissart’s text sometimes takes us one stage further forwards by subverting – momentarily, but no less unforgettably for that – the very image of social order that it purports to uphold. This important feature is explored through close analysis of an episode from Book II depicting a key moment in the struggle between Louis, count of Flanders, and the people of Ghent, under their leader Philip van Artevelde.

Royalty Reflected in the Chronicles of Froissart

This chapter focuses on some of the ways in which issues attendant upon the notion of kingship are explored and illustrated in Jean Froissarts Chronicles , in text and image. The primary focus is on problematic succession (entailing recourse to force of arms, or to argument and the use of visual rhetoric). The solemn significance of the accession of a new king (and sometimes lineage) is often illustrated by a coronation miniature. The chivalrous king, born noble or otherwise, is a central figure in the Chronicles . Two illustrative programmes are explored in the chapter, and both deal with one subject which is the assassination by Enrique of Trastamara of Pedro the Cruel of Castile. Royalty looms large in the Chronicles , both in text and image; treatments of it are also often refracted, inasmuch as its representation is rarely unproblematic. Keywords: Chronicles ; coronation miniature; Jean Froissart; royalty