to court documents and could apparently interview Lombard, Visigoth, and Slavic ambassadors. His awareness of events in the Byzantine world is also usually explained by the proximity of Burgundy to Byzantine Italy. Manuscripts The chronicle exists in over thirty manuscripts, which both Krusch and the English medievalist Roger Collins group into five classes. The original chronicle is lost, but it exists in an uncial copy made in 715 by a Burgundian monk named Lucerius. This copy, the sole exemplar of a class 1 manuscript, is in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (MS Latin 10910) and is sometimes called the Codex Claromontanus because it was once owned by the Collège de Clermont in Paris. A diplomatic edition was prepared by the French historian Gabriel Monod and published in 1885. The Codex Claromontanus was also the basis of the critical edition by Krusch published in 1888 and of the partial English translation by Wallace-Hadrill published in 1960. Most of the other surviving manuscripts were copied in Austrasia and date from the early ninth century or later. The first printed version, the editio princeps, was published in Basel by Flacius Illyricus in 1568. He used MS Heidelberg University Palat. Lat. 864 as his text. The next published edition was Antiquae Lectiones by Canisius at Ingolstadt in 1602. The manuscript was made available on the World Digital Library on December 20, 2017. Structure In the critical edition by Krusch the chronicle is divided into four sections or books. The first three books are based on earlier works and cover the period from the beginning of the world up to 584; the fourth book continues up to 642 and foreshadows events occurring between 655 and 660. In the prologue the author (traditionally Fredegar) writes: I have most carefully read the chronicles of St Jerome, Hydatius and a certain wise man, of Isidore as well as of Gregory, from the beginning of the world to the declining years of Guntram's reign; and I have reproduced successively in this little book, in suitable languages and without many omissions, what these learned men have recounted at length in their five chronicles. In fact, Fredegar quotes from sources that he does not acknowledge and drastically condenses some of those he does. He also inserts additional sections of text that are not derived from his main sources. These inserted sections are referred to as "interpolations". For most of them the