Time & Perspective Quote by Jean Froissart

He casts history-writing as blacksmithing: hot, noisy labor that turns raw stuff into a usable shape. Froissart could have called his work a chronicle or a record; instead he “entered my smithy,” making authorship physical and artisanal. That metaphor is doing a lot of quiet persuasion. A smith is skilled, not merely educated. He knows how to heat, strike, and temper. The line implies that the past is not self-evident; it has to be worked. It also implies that workmanship can be judged: a good forge yields strong metal, a bad one yields brittle lies.

The “noble material of time past” is a value claim disguised as description. Froissart isn’t treating events as neutral data. He’s writing in a chivalric world that wants its wars, tournaments, and princes to mean something, and “noble” signals that the past he selects is the past of courts, battles, and reputations worth preserving. The subtext is exclusion: peasants, women outside dynastic politics, and the unglamorous machinery of economics aren’t “material” in the same way. What gets forged is memory aligned with elite ideals.

Context matters because Froissart is a late-medieval chronicler operating before modern archival norms, traveling, interviewing, compiling, smoothing contradictions into narrative. “Again” hints at iterative return: each new patron, each new upheaval in the Hundred Years’ War, sends him back to rework the story. The forge metaphor also doubles as a defense. If history is a crafted object, then artistry and selection aren’t corruptions; they’re the job. He frames mediation as virtue, not bias, and invites the reader to admire the hammer marks.