Brepols

En 1624, quelques mois après l’accession d’Urbain VIII au trône de Saint Pierre, plusieurs espéraient un infléchissement de la condamnation venue interdire en 1616 l’enseignement du mouvement de la Terre autour du Soleil alors défendue publiquement par Galilée. Etait de ceux-là l’inspirateur des thèses, le jésuite Grégoire de Saint-Vincent, né à Bruges une quarantaine d’années auparavant : il avait activement participé à la séance du Collège Romain lorsque Galilée en 1611 commentait ses observations au télescope de planètes comme Saturne ou Vénus, ce qui faisait « murmurer les philosophes ». Ainsi le raconte Grégoire lui-même. Les thèses de 1624 montrent une extraordinaire représentation de Saturne. Voilà un exemple parmi bien d’autres des surprises de ces thèses.

Onze chapitres, suivis d’une bibliographie, organisent l’enquête sur les thèses, cellesci étant traduites au chapitre IX. Le document est d’abord présenté avec les problèmes qu’il pose à l’historien. Puis le moment même des thèses, l’imaginaire des hommes de cette période, et les positions épistémologiques d’alors sont discutés, tant avec le texte qu’avec les images. Cette conjonction d’analyses est essentielle à l’enquête qui se poursuit sur les acteurs des thèses, avec trois récits possibles, le récit historique de la journée des thèses, le récit scientifique du contenu mais aussi le récit iconologique. A ce point, on peut entrer d’une part dans la tradition des thèses universitaires, d’autre part dans la tradition du livre illustré. Ce qui, à partir des travaux des historiens de la mécanique, permet d’aboutir à une discussion sur la place de ces thèses dans une histoire qui a tant servi à constituer les diverses philosophies des sciences, dont le positivisme, le constructivisme, etc. Après la traduction proposée, il convient de revenir à titre de justification sur le détail de chaque théorème et de chaque vignette, et de terminer par le vocabulaire latin des thèses. Cette démarche est tout le contraire de la démarche dogmatique si naturelle à l’histoire des sciences, discipline dont il faut se rappeler qu’elle doit beaucoup au positivisme.

Si l’enquête sur les textes et les images s’avère beaucoup plus longue que les courtes thèses, le plaisir n’est-il pas au final de retrouver la cohérence d’un des mondes du baroque à l’aube de la science moderne ? L’intérêt est en particulier de surprendre la façon dont un intellectuel issu d’un ordre religieux connu pour son obéissance disciplinaire, parvient malgré la rigoureuse orthodoxie récemment mise en place, à raisonnablement donner sa place à une nouvelle imagination, sans entrer en dissidence mais sans céder, cherchant sans aucun doute à libérer la pensée religieuse de la pensée scientifique, et s’aidant alors de la pensée toute profane d’un peintre d’emblèmes.

Précédant de peu Jeanne d’Arc et le duc René II, figures emblématiques d’un Moyen Âge lorrain flamboyant, Charles II apparaît comme un prince de second rang. Son règne (1390-1431) est associé, non sans raison, aux temps les plus sombres de l’histoire de la Lorraine, devenue l’épicentre douloureux d’une Europe qu’embrasait par le jeu des alliances le conflit franco-anglais de la Guerre de Cent Ans. Pourtant, s’en tenir là serait oublier que Charles II fut l’instigateur de la réunion des duchés de Lorraine et de Bar et qu’il posa les bases de l’État princier en Lorraine.

Rassemblant patiemment une documentation dispersée au gré des aléas de l’histoire, délaissant les impasses d’une historiographie longtemps préoccupée par la question de l’État-nation et prisonnière de l’antagonisme exacerbé entre la France et l’Allemagne, Christophe Rivière réévalue ici un règne trop longtemps méconnu et trop facilement renvoyé à ses archaïsmes. Son enquête prosopographique livre les contours d’une société politique originale ; il analyse le dialogue qu’elle entretient avec le prince dans un espace politiquement morcelé, au sein duquel se rencontrent et s’affrontent les influences venues du royaume de France et de l’Empire ; empruntant aux ethnologues les concepts d’ « acculturation » et de « métissage », il éclaire les valeurs qui cimentent cette société nobiliaire, valeurs par lesquelles elle se rapproche ou se distingue tour à tour des principautés voisines pour faire progressivement place à l’affirmation de la souveraineté ducale.

L’Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, première histoire universelle écrite en prose française au début du XIIIe siècle, a joui d’une grande fortune en Italie, comme le montrent les manuscrits copiés dans les ateliers transalpins, les traductions, les citations et les réemplois jusqu’à la première moitié du XIVe siècle. Les traductions italiennes, ou volgarizzamenti, se divisent en deux groupes : les versions toscanes et les vénitiennes. Parmi les traductions toscanes, nous trouvons celle contenue dans trois manuscrits du Trecento, rédigée probablement entre la fin du XIIIe siècle et le début du XIVe. Le plus récent de ces codices, le manuscrit II I 146 de la Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale de Florence, est le seul témoin de l’Histoire ancienne en italien qui présente la section alexandrine ; il est utilisé comme base pour l’édition proposée ici, qui offre le récit sur Rome (depuis la fondation jusqu’aux guerres contre les Samnites), la Perse, Philippe II de Macédoine, Alexandre le Grand et les guerres des diadoques. Cette traduction toscane représente probablement l’une des plus anciennes versions italiennes de l’histoire d’Alexandre.

Stretching from Basel to Cologne, the Rhine formed the geographical axis of a broad cultural realm in the late Middle Ages, lending vitality not only to its cities and universities but also to the two great Councils to which it played host. Already in the fourteenth century, the lives of such famous German mystics as Meister Eckhart, Heinrich Seuse and Johannes Tauler testify to the presence of an advanced intellectual culture in the cities of the upper and lower Rhine. In the fifteenth century, the most famous Councils of the late Middle Ages took place along the Rhine, namely the Councils of Constance and Basel, which formed loci of intellectual exchange and which became seedbeds of philosophical ideas that engaged and influenced such participants as Heymericus de Campo and Nicholas of Cusa. With the establishment of the Universities of Cologne (1388), Freiburg (1457), Basel (1459) and Mainz (1476), the intellectual culture of this region took an institutional form that continues to exist to this day, and symbolizes the stability of the intellectual culture of the Rhineland. The main purpose of this volume is to explore the intellectual richness and vitality of the Rhineland in its various facets and on its different levels.

This is a significant new study of the festival culture of northern Europe in the later Middle Ages: more specifically of the German-speaking communities of the great cities of the eastern Baltic littoral in what was then called Livonia. While subject to a degree of Scandinavian influence, the festival culture of Livonian cities such as Riga, Reval (Tallinn), and Dorpat (Tartu), all members of the Hanseatic League, substantially overlapped with that of other German-speaking areas, not least the Hanseatic cities of northern Germany.

The major part of the book is devoted to the main annual festivals of the merchants' guilds: Christmas, Carnival, the popinjay shoot, and the May Count celebrations. There follows an analysis of specific aspects of the festivals: spatial contexts, finances, food and drink, entertainments (dances, jousts, games), customs and rituals. There is also a concluding glance at changes in festival culture after the Reformation. The study combines close scrutiny of local customs (made possible by the almost miraculous survival of uniquely detailed documentation), contextualization within the wider comparative context of festival culture in late-medieval Europe, and an alterness to significant recent scholarship in both English and German.

Urban hierarchy means a new study approach that focuses on the reciprocal concurrence of relationships between urban centers, their complementarity, opposition, support and ongoing collaboration. The goal is to go beyond the single analysis of a city and focus on the interaction between towns and cities and to distinguish their dynamics and the degree of specialization within a political framework. The final objective is to provide a comprehensive historical analysis as urban history requires, open to the advantages of interdisciplinarity and the contributions of the international researchers that will take part in the session. The processes of urban hierarchization are not only vital for observing the dynamics of cities, but also for studying in depth the response capabilities of the urban systems in the face of new challenges and stimuli. These aspects of the historical analysis of cities are still quite unexplored and, therefore, they will receive a great deal of attention in the book. The initial regional frameworks will not exclude small towns and rural centers since, even though they may look less potentially relevant, they might display greater specific development. Thanks to a renewed methodology and special attention to the empirical basis, it is possible to improve our knowledge of the urban systems of European regions at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Early Modern Era, shedding light on some aspects of the medieval past that will also influence other scientific areas of humanities.

From the end of the thirteenth century onwards, European towns exhibited a significant increase in the use of writing as a tool for administrative and economic purposes, as well as for social communication. The medieval towns of Poland are no exception to this pattern.

This book surveys the development of the literacy of Polish burghers in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, revealing socio-economic and cultural processes that changed the life of Polish urban society. Polish urban literacy is examined according to the reception of Western European urban culture more generally. Town networks in medieval Poland are explained, and the literacy skills of the producers and users of the written word are discussed. Literacy skills differed greatly from one social group to another, it is shown, due to the variety of town dwellers (clerics and lay people, professionals of the written word, occasional users of writing, and illiterates). Other issues that are discussed include the cooperation between agents of lay and church literacy, the relationship between literacy and orality, and the difference between developing literacies in Latin and in the vernacular languages.

This collection of essays by international scholars focuses on the vernacular urban culture of the Chambers of Rhetoric in the Low Countries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Reflecting social, religious, and economic realities at a time of fundamental change, the Rhetoricians’ plays also reveal a range of poetic and theatrical conventions that make them an important source of information both on practical stagecraft and on the role of theatre in the urban community, as seen in their involvement in civic processions or the organization of drama competitions. The volume sets the Rhetoricians’ drama in the cultural life of the provinces of the Low Countries during a period dominated by ruling foreign dynasties: the Burgundian dukes and then the Habsburg dynasty, most prominently the Emperor Charles V and his son King Philip II of Spain. It was a time of intense religious controversy which gave rise to debates both on and off stage. These debates, far from damaging Rhetorician culture, actually stimulated its activities and development to such an extent that Rhetoricians became representative voices for their time. The admixture of entertainment and education offered by the Chambers to their own members - and to a wider public - was one which, though originating in a medieval context, soon became linked with humanist and Renaissance thinking. This volume illustrates how, as a consequence, the Chambers of Rhetoric contributed to the development in the Low Countries of an increasingly articulate society.

The essays in this volume offer a state-of-the-art analysis of a heretofore somewhat neglected part of financial history: the way in which urban governments in Western Europe during the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Times handled the public debts their cities were confronted with. The technical aspects of the sale of annuities (renten, rentes) may have already been abundantly studied, but the links with social and political history still needed to be tackled. Who bought these annuities and thus participated in sharing the burden and profits which were likely to arise from them? What were their motives? How did the obvious links with urban elites work? And, perhaps most significantly, how did these occasional sales evolve into a structural way of linking financially important private persons with public finances, in the context both of cities and of growing states, since often the cities needed the money on a short-term basis in order to accomplish their own financial obligations toward ‘the state’. Participants in the colloquium where a large number of the essays were first presented represent in the first place the urban strongholds of Europe in the period under scrutiny: the Low Countries and Northern and Central Italy, but the Swiss cities, the cities of Aragon, London and papal Rome are also considered.