Jean Froissart’s Chroniques cover the period from around 1326 to around 1400 and are the single most important contemporary prose narrative about the first part of the Hundred Years’ War. More than 150 manuscript volumes containing the Chronicles have survived in more than 30 different libraries across Europe and North America. Of the four Books of the Chronicles the first three exist in substantially different versions.

The manuscript tradition of Froissart’s Chronicles is a particularly rich quarry for research into many aspects of the period (history, art history, book production, language and literature), but research has to date been hampered by difficulties in comparing original materials dispersed to libraries across several countries. The Online Froissart offers access to the core manuscript tradition of the first three Books of Froissart’s Chronicles, and to some manuscripts of Book IV. It delivers complete or partial transcriptions of all 114 surviving manuscripts containing Books I-III, partial transcriptions of three witnesses of Book IV, a new translation into modern English of a selection of chapters, providing readers with an accessible way of exploring chapters selected from the first three Books, several complete high-resolution reproductions of illuminated manuscript copies, including many pages containing miniatures, and a range of secondary materials (codicological descriptions, name/place index, historical and textual commentaries accompanying the transcriptions, scholarly essays, a glossary and some commentaries on the illustrations). A Quick start page for new users provides a quick orientation.

The Online Froissart also provides a number of advanced tools with which to unlock the riches of the resource. These include a collation tool allowing word-by-word comparisons for select chapters, a search engine for simple and complex queries, a transcription viewing mode allowing users to go straight to definition entries in the online Dictionnaire du Moyen Français, and a dedicated manuscript viewer for manipulating the electronic facsimiles. Well-known episodes can be quickly located via the chapter summaries or using the page numbers of modern editions.

The Online Froissart is the result of an international collaborative project led by Peter Ainsworth and Godfried Croenen, to which a large number of scholars have contributed. The project received AHRC funding between 2007 and 2010. More information about project history, the various collaborators on the project and each collaborator’s contributions can be found under About the Project.