3Mario Longtin affirms that the chronicler is quite selective in his accounts of crime and punishment. Philippe’s choices do not correspond to actual crime statistics (in type or frequency), but rather display a predilection for extraordinary events likely to evoke awe and amazement in his readers. Philippe’s version of one such event, the execution in 1437 of a roofer convicted of stealing chalices, is illuminated by comparison with his source text, the Chronique du Doyen de Saint-Thiébaut. Read in the context of popular songs and novellas of the period, Philippe’s subtle rewriting proves to have hidden interpretive and aesthetic value.

4Susannah Crowder’s essay similarly explores the fertile discrepancies between historical “fact” and Philippe’s presentation of events. Examining Philippe’s retelling of a 1468 “jeu de ma damme saincte Katherine de Senne” and the subsequent marriage of its principal actor, Crowder takes historical inacurracy as her point of departure. Philippe reconfigures the accounts given by his predecessors (Jehan Aubrion and Jacomin Husson) to forge links between the events of 1468 and an old, unresoved conflict between the city of Metz and the de la Tour family. Particularly noteworthy is Philippe’s foregrounding of female performance, patronage, and sanctity in the interest of civic harmony.

5David LaGuardia takes issue with the oft-asserted claims of “realism” in Philippe’s Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles. Reading the transgressive acts in these tales against contemporary literary and legal conventions, LaGuardia demonstrates that Philippe’s novellas constitute a “hybrid” world marked by profound ambiguity. The very crimes against persons and property that are deplored by the chronicler are paradoxically celebrated when translated into a comic code. The narrator’s alleged didactic intentions only partially recuperate the unbridled transgressions that drive the plots and give Philippe’s tales a distinctive narrative voice.

6All three of these essays attest to Philippe’s creative engagement with social and political conflict as well as the dominant modes of artistic expression in late medieval Metz. Although he drew heavily upon existing sources in both his historiographical and imaginative works, Philippe’s contributions to the cultural memory of Metz are most evident in the intricacies of his rewriting.