Textual and personal networks: The Chronique Abrégée in fifteenth-century Paris

When Denis Sauvage first edited Nicole Gilles’s chronicle in the sixteenth century, he commented on the number of surviving manuscripts with marginal annotations and amendments, suggesting that this reflected a reading and writing community engaging with the text. Subsequent research has not uncovered a multiplicity of manuscripts of Gilles’s work as Sauvage’s comments might suggest we would, but rather a collection of very similar texts — abridged chronicles of the Latin chronicle of St Denis which appear to have circulated amongst a group of men active mainly in the royal court in Paris in the fifteenth century. This paper will explore the material similarities and differences in a corpus of some 70 manuscripts, representing nine or more closely related textual traditions. The physical objects of manuscripts will be plotted as nodes in a network and their material characteristics (physical support, size, page layout, library stamps) will form edges between them. A separate network will plot the personal con

22-10-2020 10:00 - 10:45