The Lancelot en prose of the Dunois Master

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Research, Census and Virtual Reconstruction of a Dismembered Manuscript

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In 2023, the Organisation pour la Protection des Manuscrits Médiévaux (OProM), Paris, entrusted Professor Carla Rossi with the study and virtual reconstruction of a major illuminated manuscript of the Lancelot en prose, produced in Paris around 1440 and illustrated by the Dunois Master (Jean Haincelin) and his workshop. The research, conducted by Professor Rossi and developed in editorial collaboration with Éditions Pigouchet, combines provenance investigation, textual scholarship, codicology and the comparative study of medieval textual and iconographic cycles.

The dismembered codex contained the Lancelot propre, the Queste du Saint Graal and the Mort le roi Artu. Its surviving cuttings preserve almost square miniatures, generally measuring approximately ten centimetres on each side, with portions of the original French text preserved on their reverse sides. The coexistence of image and text has enabled Professor Rossi to reconstruct the position of the surviving cuttings within the textual and narrative sequence of the lost manuscript, rather than treating the miniatures as isolated works of art.

Professor Rossi’s research has so far documented thirty-five surviving cuttings. Thirty-four of them were formerly assembled in a red morocco album associated with the Murat family. The album subsequently entered the possession of the London dealer and collector Wynne R. H. Jeudwine, who removed the miniatures from the binding and exhibited them individually at the Alpine Club Gallery in London in 1962. Their subsequent circulation through dealers, auction houses and private collections resulted in a second dispersal. A further cutting, now preserved at the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College, does not appear to have belonged to the Murat album and demonstrates that the surviving corpus extends beyond Jeudwine’s group of thirty-four.

The reconstruction undertaken by Professor Rossi began with the three cuttings preserved in the Museo Civico Amedeo Lia in La Spezia. Their identification and textual analysis provided three widely separated points of reference within the narrative sequence and became the starting point for the reconstruction of the dispersed codex. Other surviving miniatures have been traced to the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University and the Liberna Collection at the Draiflessen Collection in Mettingen, while others remain in private collections or can presently be documented only through auction catalogues, exhibition records and booksellers’ archives.

A decisive element of Rossi’s method has been the evidence preserved on the reverse sides. The surviving portions of text have been identified within the Lancelot en prose and used to restore the relative position of individual cuttings within the original codex. Numbers and annotations preserved on several cuttings have also been examined palaeographically and codicologically. They cannot be interpreted as a straightforward sequential numbering of the miniatures and must therefore be distinguished from the order established through textual evidence.

Particularly important to the reconstruction has been the systematic comparison with BnF, MS français 111, whose textual sequence and cycle of 278 miniatures provide a major comparative witness for the lost manuscript. Comparison with this codex, together with other witnesses of the prose Lancelot tradition and with the editions of H. Oskar Sommer and Alexandre Micha, has enabled Rossi to identify individual episodes, determine the narrative intervals separating the surviving cuttings and distinguish between what can be established from material and textual evidence and what can only be proposed as a reconstruction of the lost iconographic programme.

The resulting virtual reconstruction does not seek to efface the history of the manuscript’s destruction by creating the illusion of an intact codex. Rossi’s reconstruction deliberately preserves the distinction between surviving evidence, textual identification and hypothetical restitution. Its purpose is to make the history of the manuscript and its dismemberment intelligible: to reunite intellectually what physical destruction and subsequent commercial dispersion separated, to document the successive movements of the surviving fragments, and to restore, as far as the evidence permits, the relationship between text, image and narrative sequence that originally structured the codex.

The three miniatures preserved at the Museo Civico Amedeo Lia occupy a central place in this reconstruction. Far from constituting three isolated remnants of the dispersed manuscript, they provide independent textual and iconographic anchors at distant points in the narrative. It was from these three fragments that Professor Rossi’s reconstruction of the manuscript began.

The results of Professor Carla Rossi’s research are now presented in a scholarly monograph published by Éditions Pigouchet. An Italian edition and an English edition present the history of the manuscript, the reconstruction of its dispersal, the census and identification of the surviving cuttings, the textual investigation and the virtual reconstruction of the lost codex.