Liel Boyce and Dr. Jesse Hurlbut, Department of French and Italian (HUM)
The Duke of Burgundy was a major broker of art, culture, civilization and power in Western Europe in the fifteenth century. The administration of his wealth and all his expenditures was centralized in a single office called the “Chambre des Comptes.” These annual records span nearly the entire century, and, in most cases, at least one of the copies from each year survives today. In an earlier project under a former MEG grant, Professor Hurlbut and a small team of students photographed these historical documents from the departmental archives in Lille, France. However, because of the archaic, stylized lettering in which they were originally recorded, these records are difficult to decipher and are therefore of limited accessibility to scholars and researchers today. The purpose of our project was to transcribe and edit a portion of these records, and place them in an online database, in order to make them readily available and understandable. We also planned to then analyze the Duke’s expenditures on gifts and rewards from two different years.
Some of these documents had already been transcribed by this earlier team, and placed in the online database (http://burgundy.byu.edu/bart/). All of manuscript ADN B-2017 had been transcribed, but not all the transcriptions had been edited. Only pieces of ADN B-2020 had been transcribed. My role in this project was to edit pieces of B-2017 and transcribe a portion of B-2020. My focus in each manuscript was the section titled “Dons et Recompensacions,” which concentrates on the gifts and rewards given by the Duke of Burgundy (such as wedding gifts).
I started the project with the editing in B-2017. This work was also useful training in preparation for transcribing B-2020, which I began within a month. At this point, I began weekly meetings with Professor Hurlbut so that he could supervise my work. At these meetings, we would review my transcriptions and resolve any historical or language problems that had arisen. It took the entire semester to transcribe all of “Dons et Recompensacions” from B-2020, and coding the transcriptions has gone over schedule as well.
I am continuing the process of encoding the transcriptions with XML. This coding will enable scholars to do deeper research at a faster pace, further opening the documents for research. After I have finished with coding, the transcriptions will be put on the online database. Because I underestimated the time involved in the transcribing process, I have not yet been able to research the data in the documents, but the documents will be available online for others to research.
This project has given me experience and a set of skills that I could not easily have gained otherwise. I plan to continue my work and research in this topic, especially as I begin my Master’s program in French Studies here at BYU. It gives me background for future projects, as well as a pool of knowledge and skills that will benefit me in future studies.