Translating Collectives in the Chronicle of Morea

The Chronicle of Morea designates a complex fourteenth-century historiographic tradition recounting the Frankish conquest and thirteenth-century political history of the Peloponnese. Preserved in four medieval languages and in both verse and prose, it represents a fundamentally translational work in its composition and reception. Although the Greek version likely preceded the shorter French one, its textual genesis remains debated. Despite noting its ‘unreliability’ for reconstructing historical events and figures, modern scholars recognize the Chronicle as a crucial source for the social and cultural history of Frankish Morea. Previous scholarship has examined its narrative structure, narratorial voices, and treatment of ethnic relations between Romans and Franks. Notably, the Greek version features both collective narratees and instances of collective direct discourse—elements largely absent from the French text. Yet, the role of collective characters beyond ethnic identity remains insufficiently explored. This paper offers a qualitative narratological analysis of collective characters in the Greek and French Chronicles and their modern annotated translations. In recent narratology, collective characters—narrative entities that act, perceive, and feel as groups—are understood as more than aggregates of individuals. They endure through changing membership and possess distinct narrative capacities compared to individual characters. These dynamics become further complicated by modern historiographic practices, which selectively attribute historical personhood to individual narrative characters while neglecting or questioning that of the collective ones. Through case studies of military conflicts and assemblies across linguistic versions, the paper traces how collective entities are narrated, transformed, and redefined in translation. It argues that examining these shifting portrayals reveals how the Chronicle negotiates between individual and collective subjectivities, and how translation mediates the boundaries between narrative and historical collectivities.