Brix, Antoine <br/><br/>
The making of the Grandes Chroniques de France 

 -  2020.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 59 
<br/><br/> This paper offers a reassessment of the history of the literary success enjoyed by the Grandes Chroniques de France during the fourteenth and fifteen centuries. This history of the kings of France from their Trojan origins was written at the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Denis c. 1274, and then continued up to the time of King Philip VI. The last continuation, which is a chronicle of kings John II and Charles V, was composed outside of Saint-Denis, probably at court, and was completed c. 1381. In this state, the Grandes Chroniques went on to become one of the most widely disseminated French works of the Middle Ages, with more than 115 copies still extant today. Scholars have usually considered the Grandes Chroniques to be a propaganda tool commissioned and circulated by the kings in order to support the building and consolidation of a unified state apparatus around the crown, and more generally to strengthen the feeling of national belonging among owners and readers of Grandes Chroniques manuscripts. It was generally assumed that King Saint Louis (1226–1270) commissioned the first part of the Grandes Chroniques, that King Charles V (1364–1380) deliberately fostered the circulation of the work, and that the public reacted enthusiastically, acquiring and reading the text credulously. The present paper intends to challenge this conception as a whole, so that a reconsidered view of the topic may emerge, which takes into account the results brought forward by studies conducted on the numerous manuscripts of the work. In an unfinished and posthumous book published in 2016, Bernard Guenée (1927–2010) argues that the Grandes Chroniques were not commissioned by Saint Louis, but rather by Mathieu de Vendôme, the abbot of Saint-Denis. Guenée passed away before he could further investigate the implications of such a hypothesis. By shifting the attention from the kings to Saint-Denis, Guenée’s last work encourages scholars to consider the Grandes Chroniques as a product of a Benedictine abbey, conveying a conception of history that was very specific to this religious house. A close examination of significant passages of the text highlights the extent to which Saint-Denis historiographers were concerned with supporting the material and spiritual claims of their abbey, one of the most powerful religious houses in high and late medieval France. As the Grandes Chroniques are not necessarily sympathetic to the kings of France, one may question whether the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century kings actually supported the copying and circulating of the text, as is generally assumed. Indeed, the traditional hypothesis regarding the traditio textus of the Grandes Chroniques is that MS fr. 2813 of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Charles V’s own copy of the text, served as a model for all subsequent witnesses. This misconception has led generations of scholars to assume that Charles V had consciously supported the dissemination of the text, while in fact his personal manuscript proves to be unique upon closer examination. No other extant copy shares its particularities. Furthermore, the examination of a 1410 judicial case brought before the Parlement de Paris showcases what little support the crown actually gave to the Grandes Chroniques when their auctoritas was publicly challenged. The success of luxury copies of the Grandes Chroniques is most significant in princely houses and aristocratic families from the time of Charles VI to the end of the fifteenth century. In such contexts, manuscripts of the Grandes Chroniques passed from one generation to the next, preserved as precious symbols of belonging to an elite family and a house distinguished by its lavish library. Such houses, like those of Berry, Bourbon, and Bourgogne, allowed for a large geographical circulation of copies, south of the Loire and north of the Somme. All the while, it appears that the kings paid very little attention to the Grandes Chroniques, owning no witness of the text from the 1430s all the way to the dawn of the French Renaissance. In the third and final part of the present paper, the study of the reception of the Grandes Chroniques preserved in prestigious illuminated copies also challenges the traditional assumption that this history was universally accepted as the truth in the medieval Kingdom of France. While some copies may never have been read at all, being considered prestigious artefacts rather than texts to peruse, others may have been read aloud, and only some display tangible signs of being carefully studied. Annotations scattered in several copies indicate critical readings of the text, with some users of the Grandes Chroniques writing down expressions of their disbelief in the margins or arguing about the interpretation of historical events recounted differently in other sources. The Grandes Chroniques did not necessarily enjoy greater authority than other historical works available at the time. This goes to show how versatile and contradictory the reception of Grandes Chroniques manuscript copies would be, depending greatly on the situation in which one used this historical work. As general assumptions about the role of the kings in the success of the Grandes Chroniques fail to explain what stems from studying manuscript copies of the work, this paper stresses that the exceptional fortune of the work should be considered as a complex phenomenon from the making of the text all the way to the reception of its copies—a phenomenon that cannot be apprehended as a single enterprise of royal policy.