Onomastic Material

The index of names covers the transcriptions, translations, name and editorial commentaries, codicological descriptions as well as the essays. The bulk of the name material in the index is extracted from the transcriptions, which in total contain about 407,000 references to named entities (persons, places, collectives, etc.). Of these occurrences currently about 233,000 items (57.3%) are linked to entries in the name index.

The name index contains 4350 main entries. It also contains 210 cross-reference entries and a further 451 combined entries. The latter are not displayed in the index but are used to link composite named entity references in the transcriptions (such as ‘the dukes of Berry and Burgundy’) to the index and to provide popup windows for these composite references in the transcriptions.

Apart from the lemma or heading, the entries in the name index normally contain a minimum of historical or geographical information to identify the person, place or collective being referred to in the text where the reference occurs. The index is therefore effectively a biographical and geographical gazetteer for the transcriptions on the Online Froissart.

It is not the ambition of the Online Froissart project team to replace existing resources such as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Rather, the index entries are a way of providing a brief commentary on the historical characters and geographical names that are relevant for an informed reading of Froissart’s Chronicles. In composing these short entries our focus has very much been on those aspects having a direct bearing on the reading and interpretation of the transcriptions.

Currently about 70% of the entries in the index contain full information, with the other 30% containing only the heading, which acts as the name identification and contains a standardised modern spelling of the name. The collaborator responsible for the creation of each individual entry is indicated within each entry. The full version of the name entries normally provides some bibliographical references to the main secondary sources used and/or to the most important reference works that are relevant to the information given in an entry. Many entries do not as yet give any bibliography, but work on this aspect is in progress.

The entries that are currently incomplete will be completed in future versions. Their inclusion in this unfinished state may seem rather pointless to users of the name index, but these records serve three important purposes. First, they provide a standardised and modern version of the name, which in many cases may already be sufficient for users to understand which person or place is being referred to. Second, they allow the identification via pop-up windows of otherwise non-obvious references to persons or places (e.g. ‘le roy’, ‘la ville’, etc.). Third, they also allow the search engine to identify all the keyed occurrences of these names across the entire collection of transcriptions and other materials.

As and when new transcriptions are added and new names identified, new index entries will be created; existing entries will be augmented and linked to occurrences in the text. Occurrences of names which have not yet been linked to name entries will be added to new or existing entries in the name index. Users need to be aware that occurrences of references to named entities that are not yet linked to the index entries will, of course, not be listed in the search results when a name key search is executed (this includes clicking on the link ‘Click here to find all occurrences of this name’).