L’histoire des rois de France dans la “Fleur des histoires” de Jean Mansel. Archéologie d’une compilation bourguignonne du xve siècle

Abstract

It has generally been assumed that Burgundian compiler Jean Mansel borrowed the history of the kings of France included in his Fleur des histoires from the Grandes Chroniques de France, the most widely circulated French historiographical work at the time. The present paper challenges this assumption, focusing the attention on a particular segment of Mansel’s Fleur in its short redaction. Extant in five manuscripts, this section covers the history of the French kings from Charlemagne to Charles VI. A comparison of Mansel’s text with that of the Chronique de France jusque 1380 discloses the striking similarities of the two works in their recounting of the history of the kings of France. It appears that both authors are not dependent on the Grande Chroniques as much as they are indebted to an already reworked and rewritten redaction of this work. Indeed, Jean Mansel and the author of the Chronique jusque 1380 provide a history of the French sovereigns which comes from the Abrégé Paulin Paris. Lexical and stylistic resemblance between Mansel’s Fleur and the Chronique jusque 1380 indicates both authors mined an intermediate, unidentified text based on the Abrégé; chronology in the composition of the two works and divergent choices in the selection of episodes recounted assure that the authors worked independently from one another.