Froissart attended a wedding in Milan where Chaucer and Petrarch were also guests
Jean Froissart spent his life chasing stories of knights and kings across England, Scotland, Wales, France, Flanders and Spain. His Chronicles became the classic voice of 14th-century chivalry and a key source on the early Hundred Years' War. At one Milanese wedding he shared the room with two other literary giants.
Froissart came from Valenciennes, in the County of Hainaut on the western edge of the Holy Roman Empire, and lived from around 1337 to around 1405. Older claims that his father painted coats of arms, or that he tried trade before becoming a cleric, rest on weak evidence. Scholars now warn against mining his poems for biography, since their first-person narrator is a literary mask; one critic calls them pseudo-autobiographical.
Around 1361 he joined the service of Philippa of Hainault, wife of England's Edward III, until her death in 1369. This is often described as a post of court poet or historian, but a study of English court archives by Croenen suggests it was no official job at all, more a courtly arrangement in which he dedicated verse to his lady and received occasional gifts.
He accompanied Lionel, Duke of Clarence, to Milan for his marriage to Violante Visconti, where Chaucer and Petrarch were also present. Later patrons, including Joanna, Duchess of Brabant, rewarded him with church incomes that paid for more research trips. Visiting England again in 1395, he seemed saddened by what he saw as the passing of chivalry. Where and when he died is unknown.
His fame rests on the Chronicles rather than his romance Meliador or his lyrics. They survive in more than 100 illuminated manuscripts; one set ordered by the Flemish noble Louis de Gruuthuse in the 1470s holds 112 miniatures by Bruges painters. He was also among the first to mention the verge escapement in European clocks, by 1368, and Edward Elgar wrote an overture named after him.
Source: Jean Froissart
