The Odyssey of the Manuscripts of Helinand’s Chronicon

Abstract

At the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Cistercian monk Helinand of Froidmont composed a comprehensive universal history, which was intensively used by Vincent of Beauvais while compiling his Speculum Historiale and Speculum Doctrinale. To date, only the fragments of Helinand’s chronicle contained in two manuscripts and one seventeenth-century printing are available to us. This begins by presenting a synthetic and chronological analysis of the late medieval and early modern scholarship on Helinand’s chronicle, exploring the motives behind the interest in the author and his universal history. This work was largely based on the data found in Vincent’s Speculum Historiale. While French historians of the mid-sixteenth century were mainly interested in Helinand’s vernacular poem Vers de la mort, the sixteenth-century Cistercian ressourcement movement prompted the Cistercian monks Karel De Visch and Bertrand Tissier to pay serious attention to Helinand’s Latin œuvre. This resulted in an edition of the b...