'Dieux y ait part': Surviving Stormy Seas in Froissart's Chroniques

For medieval people the wilderness, encompassing forests, and other uninhabited and inhospitable places, but also including the oceans, represented the opposite of society and order; this was due in large part to the inability of man to control Nature and its power. God and Fortune played a significant role in enabling a man or woman to survive any natural ordeals; this is reflected in the literature of the era. Jean Froissart, travelling chronicler-poet of Valenciennes, appears to endorse this universal 'truth' in his great historiographical prose work, the Chroniques. This article examines two episodes recounting sea travel in the Chroniques in order to analyse not only the manner in which Froissart depicts encounters with stormy seas, but also his motivations for including such passages in the work.