- Grandes Chroniques de France
The "Grandes Chroniques de France" is a royal compilation of the history of
France , its manuscripts remarkably illuminated. It was compiled between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, beginning in the reign of Saint Louis, who wished to preserve the history of the Franks from the coming of the Trojans to his own time, in an "official" chronography whose dissemination was tightly controlled. It was continued under his successors until completed in1461 . It covers theMerovingian ,Carolingian , and Direct Capetian dynasties of French kings, with illustrations depicting personages and events from virtually all their reigns.The "Grandes Chroniques de France" had its origin as a French translation of the Latin histories written and updated by the monks of Saint-Denis, who were, from the thirteenth century, official historiographers to the French kings. As first written, the "Grandes Chroniques" traced the history of the French kings from their origins in Troy to the death of Philip Augustus (1223). The continuations of the text were drafted first at Saint-Denis and then at the court in Paris. Its final form brought the chronicle down to the death of Charles V in the 1380s.
Sources for material on the reign of
Charlemagne included the "Historia Caroli Magni ", also known as the "Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle" [Geneviève Hasenohr and Michel Zink, eds. "Dictionnaire des lettres françaises: Le Moyen Age". Collection: La Pochothèque. Paris: Fayard, 1992. pp. 294-5, pp. 296-7. ISBN 2-2530-5662-6] and the "Vita Karoli Magni " byEinhard . [Geneviève Hasenohr and Michel Zink, eds. "Dictionnaire des lettres françaises: Le Moyen Age". Collection: La Pochothèque. Paris: Fayard, 1992. pp. 296-7. ISBN 2-2530-5662-6] Other sources includedAbbot Suger 's "Life of Louis IV". [Geneviève Hasenohr and Michel Zink, eds. "Dictionnaire des lettres françaises: Le Moyen Age". Collection: La Pochothèque. Paris: Fayard, 1992. pp. 296-7. ISBN 2-2530-5662-6]It survives in approximately 130 manuscripts, varying in the richness, number and artistic style of their illuminations, copied and amended for royal and courtly patrons, the central work of vernacular official historiography. Especially fine are the lavishly illustrated copies made for Charles V (
BnF , Ms. Fr. 2813), Louis VII, illuminated byJean Fouquet (1455-1460, BnF, Ms. Fr. 6465, above) andPhilip the Good of Burgundy, now in theRussian National Library ,Saint Petersburg (1457, above). For the first 150 years of the "Grandes Chroniques"'s existence, its audience was carefully circumscribed: its readership was centered in the royal court at Paris, and its owners included French kings, members of the royal family and the court, and a few highly-connected clerics in northern France. During this period, there were no copies of the work that belonged to members of theParlement or the university community. [Bernard Guenée, "Les Grandes Chroniques de France : Le roman aux rois (1274-1518)," in "La Nation", vol. 1, pt. 2, "Les lieux de mémoire", ed. Pierre Nora (Paris, Gallimard, 1986), pp 189-214. ]Notes
External links
* [http://books.google.fr/books?q=editions:0Nyg1y6sevJ4b-Oe&id=spQFAAAAQAAJ&source=gbs_other_versions_sidebar_s&cad=5 Les Grandes chroniques de France, edition by Paulin Paris]
* [http://classes.bnf.fr/villard/grand/repro/08.htm Dagobert visitant le chantier de la construction de Saint-Denis.]
*Hedeman, Anne D. 1991. "The Royal
http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft8k4008jd/] The book covers five royal and fifteen nonroyal manuscripts of the "Grandes Chroniques" which exemplify different pictorial solutions to the problem of illustrating it.
* [http://www.bnf.fr/enluminures/texte/manuscrit/aman5.htm BnF About 50 miniatures from Charles V's 14th Century Ms. (BNF, FR 2813)]
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