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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

Burgundian court, financial records, fifteenth century, Duke of Burgundy

College

Humanities

Department

French and Italian

Abstract

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 In an earlier project under a former MEG grant, Professor Hurlbut and a small team of students photographed these historical documents from the departmental archives in Lille, France.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.

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