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

`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

`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

`careful and impressive study' The Ricardian

`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

Why do Froissart's Chroniques still find enthusiastic readers six hundred years after they were written? In this fresh reading Peter Ainsworth shows 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. A record of international chivalry that pretends to the title of `history', the Chroniques are in fact neither history nor romance, though they partake a little of both and are still valued by scholars as a historical source. Rather they constitute a variegated and enthralling narrative of vast proportions, veering from the historical to the outrageously fictional, from the journalistic travelogue to the moral tale, from self-effacement in the service of impartiality to unshamed self-celebration.