Brepols

Imagining the Book offers a snapshot of current research in English manuscript study in the pre-modern period on the inter-related topics of patrons and collectors, compilers, editors and readers, and identities beyond the book. This volume responds to the recent development and institutionalization of ‘History of the Book’ within the wider discipline. Scholars working in the pre-printing era with the material vestiges of a predominantly manuscript culture are currently establishing their own models of production and reception. Research in this area is now an accepted part of twenty-first century medieval studies. Within such a context, it is frequently observed that scribal culture found imaginative ways to deal with the technological watersheds represented by the transition from memory to written record, roll to codex, or script to print. In such an ‘eventful’ environment, texts and books not infrequently slip through the semi-permeable boundaries laboured over by previous generations of medievalists, boundaries that demarcate orality and literacy; ‘literary’ and ‘historical’; ‘religious’ and ‘secular’; pre- and post-Conquest compositions, or ‘medieval’ and ‘Renaissance’ attitudes and writings. Once texts are regarded as offering indices of community- or self-definition, or models of piety and good behaviour (and the codices holding them statements of prestige and influence), the book historian is left to contemplate the real or imagined importance and status of books and writing within the larger socio-political, often local, milieux in which they were once produced and read.

Il nostro immaginario non è di grande aiuto quando cerchiamo di comprendere quello altrui, e insieme studiare i meccanismi dell’immaginazione che lo hanno elaborato. Se poi si tratta dell’Età di mezzo, lo sforzo per sgombrare la mente da pregiudizi e immagini storicamente false, ma molto di moda, dovrà essere ingente. Anche per questo nel 2008 la Società Italiana per lo Studio del Pensiero Medievale (Sispm) ha deciso di dedicare il suo convegno annuale al tema Immaginario e immaginazione nel Medioevo. Un titolo impegnativo, e anche a una prima lettura palesemente ambiguo: immaginario infatti può essere inteso come un aggettivo, ovvero il prodotto dell’immaginazione, e in senso lato è detto di qualcosa di fittizio, apparente, illusorio. Immaginario è però anche un sostantivo che indica l’insieme delle rappresentazioni del mondo e delle fantasie di un individuo o di un gruppo o di un’intera collettività. Il convegno ha preso l’avvio proprio da questa concezione di immmaginario, per proseguire sulla scia di altre possibili declinazioni: dalle immagini dell’impero ai casi dei monstra fino al ruolo della fisiognomica. Indubbiamente la deriva neoplatonica ha molto pesato sulla diffidenza almeno teoricamente espressa dagli autori medievali nei confronti dei prodotti della facoltà dell’immaginazione. Ma accanto al sospetto verso tutto ciò che proviene dalla sensibilità o ad essa riporta, si deve segnalare una forte attenzione per tutto ciò che attraverso i sensi possa aiutare l’intelletto, anche nei percorsi più arditamente teologici, e insieme un’apertura verso la realtà materiale - da un Dio buono creata e da lui così voluta -, che porta a non poter accettare in maniera totalizzante il rifiuto per una natura che si porge allo sguardo avvolta da misteriosa bellezza e che come tale viene ricostruita dalla phantasia o da una facoltà immaginativa, e poi dalle penne e dalle mani degli artisti.

Interventi di F. Amerini, M. Bettetini, G. Briguglia, F. Caldera, L. Cappelletti, M. Cristiani, G. d’Onofrio, G. Fioravanti, M. Gallarino, G. Gambale, R. Gatti, C. Motta, S. Nagel, A. Palazzo, F. Paparella, V. Perone Compagni, A. Robiglio, A. Rodolfi, J.-C. Schmitt, C. Selogna, P. Spallino, G. Zuccolin.

The subject of this publication is the treatise Aduersus Manichaeos, attributed to Evodius of Uzalis. Evodius was a friend and contemporary of Augustine of Hippo. The treatise Aduersus Manichaeos is an important source on the North African Catholic church and its polemics against the Manichaeans. Although the treatise is strongly influenced by the anti-Manichaean writings of Augustine of Hippo, it also offers much original and likely authentic information on the Manichaean movement. Thus far, however, no systematic study had been conducted on this anti-Manichaean treatise attributed to Evodius. As a result, some of its historical circumstances have been shrouded in mystery.

The present volume reconstructs the circumstances in which Aduersus Manichaeos was written, and studies the treatise in relation to its fifth-century North African context. The study offers a literary, historical and theological analysis of Aduersus Manichaeos. The publication also complements the study of Aduersus Manichaeos with a new critical edition of the original Latin text, with a facing English translation.

This volume offers a fresh approach to the structure of Bonaventure’s thought. Ruben Martello argues that Bonaventure employs the Genesis creation account as an overarching framework and fecund source for understanding nature, theology, and even Scripture itself. Beginning with Bonaventure’s view of the literal meaning of Scripture, the reception of the hexaëmeron is traced chronologically in a number of major theological works. Bonaventure is interpreted in light of the hexameral commentarial tradition like Augustine’s De Genesi ad litteram, and filtered through Dionysian and Victorine inspired hermeneutics. It is proposed that reading Genesis in Bonaventure may clarify a number of contemporary disputed theological, exegetical and epistemological concerns. This study also unpacks the Bonaventurian understanding of the distinctive senses of the 'image' and 'likeness' of God, aiding in the articulation of a rich theological anthropology.

Disputation and debate have accompanied human development from its beginnings. However, what we still call ‘disputation’, technically speaking, is a particular method of reasoning and analysing, involving either a debate between two people, or of one person with himself. It is this method which is the object of this study. The disputation was one of the main methods of teaching and research during the Middle Ages. Tracing its development shows how it influenced the way in which people examined abstract problems. Reasoning and arguing about contradictory positions remained a feature of intellectual life well into the nineteenth century, and the practice remains alive even today.

For a long time the disputation was the main tool for analysing problems in a range of fields, especially in philosophy and theology. The main features were the analysis of opposite positions and thorough discussion of the various arguments for both sides, the collective search for the truth in special public disputations, the recognition that the truth may differe from the conclusion reached and the willingness to accept better arguments if they brought one closer to the truth. All this is typical of an intellectual attitude, the key features of which are critical thinking and honest collaborative research, that still marks the Western world. The history of the disputation can tell us something about the way in which we learned to think.

In the year 721 the Anglo-Saxon missionary St Boniface came with his followers to Hessia, a small but turbulent province on the borders of the expanding Frankish kingdom. This book is the first dedicated interdisciplinary study of Boniface’s thirty-three-year mission among the Hessians. The author relates the historical sources to the rich archaeological heritage of the region in order to describe the political and cultural context of the mission and its relationship to long-term Frankish interests in the Saxon borderlands. Thanks to the survival of many letters between the missionary community and its supporters, it is also possible to examine a symbolic literary discourse that portrayed the missionaries as heroic exiles who chose to suffer torments in a distant land for the sake of Christ. Finally, fresh evidence drawn from topography and place names is used to argue for the existence of an expansive pre-Christian sacred landscape that was one of the major obstacles faced by Boniface and his followers. The result is an innovative study that brings history and archaeology into communication with the landscape, both real and imagined, in order to reconstruct a crucial moment in the conversion of Europe in all its complexity, ambiguity, and drama.          

Awarded the Josef Leinweber Prize 2009 by the Fulda Faculty of Theology.

Incubation (temple sleep) was a well-known ritual in the Near East and became increasingly popular in Classical and Hellenistic Greece, becoming attached to Asclepius and other divinities. It flourished in the Eastern Mediterranean, where it was encountered by the emergent Christianity. Temple sleep was so widespread that it was impossible to ban. The Christianization of the incubation ritual was thus a detailed and lengthy (but successful) process that encompassed several aspects of the Church’s self-definition, including important social and theological issues of the era. The list of relevant issues is extensive: the fate of Greek temples and the reinterpretation of sacred space, confronting Hippocratic medicine, and the learned Greek intelligentsia. Since disease and a search for cure is a ubiquitous human need, the early Church embraced a healing ministry, in secular terms as well as in ritual healing. Incubation records show how the Church viewed dreams, conversion, or the notions of magic and divination. All these come within the framework of writing miracles: the transformation of the cult was thus incorporated into standard Church discourse, from ritual practice to proper literary genres.

This first comprehensive monograph on Christian incubation examines the rich material of all the relevant Greek miracle collections: those of Saint Thecla, Cyrus and John, the different versions of Saint Cosmas and Damian and saint Artemios, as well as the minor incubation saints, As a result, it unfolds the transformation of healing sites and practices related to dreams as they spread across Byzantium, from rural Asia Minor to Constantinople and Alexandria.

Il realismo degli universali sostenuto nei primi decenni del XII secolo nelle scuole del Nord della Francia è stato studiato principalmente attraverso la critica di Pietro Abelardo, mentre materiale inedito a favore delle teorie realiste non sempre ha ricevuto adeguata considerazione. Questo libro analizza la teoria realista sugli universali variamente nota come ‘teoria dell’indifferenza’, ‘dell’identità’, ‘degli status’, etc., per la quale si propone qui la denominazione di ‘teoria dell’individuum’. Secondo tale posizione, infatti, l’universale è l’individuo stesso in alcuni dei suoi status.

Si tratta di una forma mitigata di realismo, sviluppatasi a partire dalla critica al più tradizionale realismo dell’essenza materiale. Elementi abelardiani sembrano incorporati nella teoria dell’individuum per un fine - la difesa del realismo - del tutto opposto a quello del maestro palatino. Lo studio considera sia fonti che criticano la teoria dell’individuum (Logica ‘Ingredientibus’, Logica ‘Nostrorum petitioni sociorum’, ‘De generibus et speciebus’), sia testi che la sostengono (il trattato ‘Quoniam de generali’ e il commento P17 all’Isagoge del ms. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 3237, ff. 123ra-130rb), analizzando nel dettaglio i trentasette argomenti presenti nella discussione.

Oggetto di indagine è inoltre l’attribuzione della teoria al maestro Gualtiero di Mortagne, attivo a Reims e Laon nella prima metà del millecento. A questo scopo sono presi in esame dati sulla vita, le opere e l’insegnamento di Gualtiero, considerando in particolare la testimonianza di Giovanni di Salisbury in Metalogicon II, 17.

Caterina Tarlazzi è British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow alla Facoltà di Filosofia dell’Università di Cambridge e College Research Associate al St John’s College, Cambridge. Ha studiato filosofia medievale alla Scuola Galileiana di Studi Superiori dell’Università di Padova, l’École Pratique des Hautes Études, l’Université Paris IV Sorbonne e l’Università di Cambridge. Le sue ricerche vertono sul pensiero del XII secolo e sui manoscritti che trasmettono le opere e l’insegnamento dei maestri di quell’epoca.

Social inequality is one of the most pressing global challenges at the start of the 21st century. Meanwhile, across the globe at least half of the world’s population lives in urban agglomerations, and urbanisation is still expanding. This book engages with the complex interplay between urbanisation and inequality. In doing so it concentrates on the Low Countries, one of the oldest and most urbanised societies of Europe. It questions whether the historic poly-nuclear and decentralised urban system of the Low Countries contributed to specific outcomes in social inequality. In doing so, the authors look beyond the most commonly used perspective of economic inequality. They instead expand our knowledge by exploring social inequality from a multidimensional perspective. This book includes essays and case-studies on cultural inequalities, the relationship between social and consumption inequality, the politics of (in)equality, the impact of shocks and crises, as well as the complex social relationships across the urban network and between town and countryside.

On 5 December 1709, in Bologna, Lucia Cremonini is accused of a terrible crime: the murder of her newborn son. This tragic episode, exhumed from the depths of time, is placed at the centre of an enthralling study by one of the leading scholars of modern history and the history of religious beliefs. During the course of a dramatic trial the crime is debated by representatives of religious, philosophical, moral, and scientific culture, all characteristic of the formative period of the modern world and all seeking a convincing answer to fundamental questions. When does life begin? When can a human being first be described as such, so that his or her killing is a crime punishable by the maximum penalty? What is the true role of baptism in the formation of the human person? These are all highly topical questions in an age like our own, where belief is subject to the powerful assaults of scientific research and new questions are being raised about the essence and the limits of human existence.

This is a translation from the original Italian publication 'Dare l'anima' (Einaudi, 2005).

Translation by Hilary Siddons.

How did societies change between the Early Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age? And what was the impetus that led to these changes — social contacts and innovation, intergenerational contacts, or perhaps simply adaptation? Taking these questions as its starting point, this richly detailed volume explores four different regions of southern Poland to compare and contrast the mechanisms that drove socio-cultural change in the region between the second and the first half of the first millennium BC. Drawing on standardized sets of archaeological data, the chapters gathered here examine the interplay of different factors influencing cultural change across five key parameters: environment; settlement patterns; settlement organization; economy; and material culture. The result is a beautifully illustrated volume that offers important insights into Central and Eastern European prehistory, made accessible for an English-speaking audience.

During the sixteenth century Antwerp was at the forefront of the Renaissance north of the Alps. Not only a new architectural style flourished in the Antwerp metropolis, but at the end of the sixteenth century sciences such as mathematics, optics, geometry and perspective became more and more important. They helped to redefine architecture and the other fine arts on a more scientific base. Their introduction in the arts at the beginning of the seventeenth century lead to new experiences, applications and even innovations in architecture. The Jesuit Order played a very crucial rule in this process. The realization of their new church in the centre of the city of Antwerp became one of the first attempts to bring together the applications of all those new ideas in one total project. Paintings by Peter Paul Rubens and sculptures by Hieronymus Duquenoy, Artus Quellinus etc. were participating in one of the first Early Baroque architectural realizations in the Low Countries. The Jesuit Church of Antwerp, currently the St Carolus Borromeus Church, was designed by François d'Aguilón, a scientist and architect of the Jesuit Order. His publication Opticorum Libri sex on optics and on the reflection of light was edited by the Officina Plantiniana in 1613, the same year he started his project for the church. This scientific and theoretical work helps us to understand the new experiences with light and space he experimented with.

It is the aim of this publication to bring together researchers to confront the results of their studies about the interpretation of the façade of this Counter-Reformation church, the phenomenon of diffuse light created by reflection and refraction on marble statues, pillars and multiple ornaments, the combination of linear and parallel perspective applications, the sacral and social use of space, the signification of the façade and towers as parts of a perspective scene in the city landscape. Special attention is also devoted to the School of Mathematics, installed in Antwerp by the Jesuits at that time.

The central question will be whether we can conclude that at the beginning of the seventeenth century the innovative sense of creating a new architecture, so typical for the sixteenth century in Antwerp, still persisted in this city during the early seventeenth century, and even lead to a new interpretation of architectural space in European context.

Some thirty years ago Michael Herren burst on the medieval Latin scene with his edition and translation of the notoriously difficult Hisperica Famina, and followed this a few years later with his translation of the prose works of Aldhelm. Notice was given that a junior scholar, unafraid to tackle some of the most obscure, complex, and arcane Latin, wished to make it accessible to non-Latinists as well as to those Latinists who lacked his particular skills. Not content with labouring alone in that field, Herren gathered scholars in Toronto to a conference on “Insular Latin Studies,” the proceedings of which he published two years later. Over the years he shed considerable light on such obscure texts and authors as Virgilius Maro Grammaticus, John Scottus Eriugena, and the Cosmographia by the pseudonymous Aethicus Ister. His research trail led him again and again to Ireland, and the Irish contribution to early medieval Latinity and to English, Carolingian, and even Italian culture. Recognizing the rich diversity of medieval Latin, Herren in 1990 founded The Journal of Medieval Latin and has, as its editor, provided a home for medieval Latinists of all stripes.

Les articles rassemblés dans ce volume ont tous trait aux manuscrits. On y retrouve la préoccupation constante du Père Boyle d'étudier le codex comme un ensemble et de l'analyser sous divers angles permettant de mieux reconstituer l'histoire du livre médiéval. Il utitlise toutes les ressources de la paléographie, de la codicologie, de l'histoire du texte et de sa décoration pour retrouver les traces du milieu d'origine et les indications nécessaires pour identifier l'auteur de(s) oeuvre(s) et pour situer les différentes étapes de composition du manuscrit. Le livre médiéval est considéré comme un objet archéologique qu'il faut étudier dans son ensemble pour retracer son histoire.

En lisant les études que le Père Boyle nous livre, on se rend compte que la recherche interdisciplinaire est indispensable pour aborder l'examen d'un codex. Tous les détails, même insignifiants à première vue, peuvent apporter un éclairage important. Si la paléographie et l'histoire de l'écriture latine sont au centre des préoccupations de l'auteur, il entend les resituer dans leur milieu d'origine. Et c'est ainsi qu'il en arrive au concept de "paléographie intégrale".

Tout chercheur engagé dans l'étude d'un manuscrit ou dans l'édition critique d'un texte devrait lire les réflexions méthodologiques faites par le Père Boyle, avant d'entreprendre son travail. Les divers exemples qu'il donne pourront servir de modèle à des recherches ultérieures. Tant les philologues que les paléographes, les codicologues que les historiens de l'art trouveront leur bien dans les articles qui ont été réunis. Après les avoir lus, ils ne regarderont plus de la même manière les manuscrits qu'ils étudient.

Puisse cette notion de "paléographie intégrale" ouvrir des horizons nouveaux aux recherches futures et faire entrevoir aux spécialistes des textes la richesse d'une telle approche. Ce serait certainement le voeu le plus cher de l'auteur de ces articles.

Starting from the hypothesis that states were crucial as agents of modernisation, this book explores why, how and with what results European states have striven to transform their agricultural sectors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Modernising agriculture has increasingly meant emulating the new organisational models of manufacturing industry. But since agriculture continues to rely heavily on living resources (plants and animals), the results of modernising farming have often differed significantly from the manufacturing sector. Modernised agriculture, in other words, is something quite different than simply industrialised agriculture.

Ranging from the Iberian Peninsula to Hungary and from Greece to England, the chapters of this book deal with four principal questions: Why have state elites, and their civil society allies chosen to modernise agriculture? What have they understood by agricultural modernisation? What sort of power resources have they taken as necessary for effective modernisation? And what were the consequences of the pursuit of modernising policies for the farming population and for agriculture?

Peter Moser is director of the Archives of Rural History in Bern. His research interests centre on the interaction of industrial societies with their agricultural sectors.

Tony Varley lectures in political science and sociology at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His research interests centre mainly on agrarian politics and rural social movements.

This book investigates the nature of intellectual activity in the Middle Ages from the perspective of medieval Scandinavia by discussing how a multimodal and multilingual Scandinavian culture emerged through the dynamic interchange of foreign and local impulses in the minds of creative intellectuals. By deploying cognitive theory, this volume conceptualizes intellectual culture as the result of the individual’s cognition, which incorporates physical perceptions of the world, memory and creation, rationality, emotionality and spirituality, and decision making. In doing so, it elucidates the diversity of social roles that could be assumed by people engaged in the activity of thinking. Attention is paid in particular to the key intellectual activities of negotiating secular and religious authority and identity; to thinking and learning through verbal and visual means; and to ruminating on worldly existence and heavenly salvation. These processes are explored in a series of essays that focus on various visual and textual artefacts, among them Church art and sculptures, manuscript fragments, and texts of both different languages (Latin and Old Norse) and genres (sagas, poetry and grammatical treatises, laws, liturgical explanations and theological texts). The variety of intellectual and ideational processes connected to the textual and material culture of medieval Scandinavia forms the focal point of this study. As a result, this book actively seeks to transcend the traditional cultural dichotomies of written versus oral material, Latin versus vernacular, lay versus secular, or European versus Nordic by foregrounding the cognitive and creative agency of intellectuals in medieval Scandinavia.

Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498) è una delle figure più rappresentative della realtà italiana della fine del Quattrocento. Al contrario di quanto affermato a lungo dalla storiografia passata - che lo rappresentava come 'relitto' dell'età medievale contrapposto ai 'precursori' della modernità - in lui convissero le contraddizioni e le necessità proprie della cultura del tempo: l'esigenza di rinnovamento spirituale e le tendenze profetiche, l'interesse per la filosofia e la letteratura classica, il tentativo di ritrovare un assetto politico che garantisse al tempo stesso stabilità e indipendenza. Ferrarese di nascita e fiorentino di adozione, a Firenze Savonarola dedicò tutte le sue energie fisiche ed intellettuali e lì mise in pratica per breve tempo, l'ideale della città celeste, la 'nuova Gerusalemme', che spesso evocava nella sua predicazione.

Le due raccolte di appunti filosofici di Girolamo Savonarola pubblicate in questo volume, il De doctrina Aristotelis e il De doctrina Platonicorum, dimostrano la sua conoscenza dei testi aristotelici e platonici, nonché la capacità di utilizzarli a scopo didattico e retorico, in funzione del suo specifico interesse pastorale. Il lavoro sulle fonti filosofiche e la loro elaborazione permettono di conoscere uno dei momenti essenziali della predicazione savonaroliana, lo strumento principale attraverso cui si esplicava l'attività profetica, politica e teologica dell'autore. Conservati nel codice della Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze, Conv. Soppr. D.VIII.985, gli appunti gettano luce sul passaggio che unisce la riflessione privata al discorso pubblico. L'introduzione e le appendici ai testi consentono al lettore di apprezzare la stratificazione del materiale filosofico, dagli appunti fino alle prediche e ai trattati, dove i brani annotati furono inseriti.

Prefazione di Gian Carlo Garfagnini.

Lorenza Tromboni ha conseguito il Dottorato di ricerca presso l'Università del Salento nel 2006 con una tesi sul De doctrina Platonicorum di Girolamo Savonarola; dal 2009 al 2011 ha beneficiato di una borsa di post-dottorato presso il Dipartimento di Filosofia dell'Università di Firenze, dove svolge attualmente la sua attività di ricerca. Dal 2002 collabora attivamente con la Società Internazionale per lo Studio del Medioevo Latino (S.I.S.M.E.L.), e con la Fondazione Ezio Franceschini, Firenze.

The cult of saints is one of the most fascinating religious developments of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Christians admired martyrs already in the second century, but for a long time they perceived them only as examples to follow and believed they could pray directly to God, whom they addressed as ‘Our Father’. A new attitude toward saints, now considered above all as powerful friends of God and efficient intercessors, started to emerge in the third century. Once this process gained momentum in the Constantinian era, the cult of saints constantly changed and rapidly adapted to new conditions and demands. This evolution highlighted many factors: the popularity of specific saints and the different types of sanctity, the spread of cults and customs, and the ways in which the saints were described, visualised, and represented.

This volume seeks to capture the dynamic of these adaptations, showing both those aspects of cult which evolved quickly and those which remained stable for a long time. It studies the evolution of the cults in a broad period from the third to the seventh centuries and in various regions from Gaul to Georgia, with a particular interest in the two greatest centres of the cult of saints: Rome and Constantinople. In response to changing needs and different circumstances, new generations of believers repeatedly modified the cults of established saints, even as they introduced new saints.

The Diyala region in eastern Iraq has long been a focal area of study for scholars of the Bronze Age, thanks both to its long history of human occupation, and its position as a site of strategic importance. Drawing on this strong tradition of scholarship and the results of numerous excavations and collections in the area, the seven contributions gathered in this volume aim to offer new insights into the cultures and societies of the Bronze Age Diyala by proposing new questions, problems, and approaches. Exploring subjects as widespread as architecture and iconography, cultural and economic history, the study of social networks, historiography, and the identification of ancient cities, these chapters explore the richness of the Bronze Age Diyala from a range of perspectives, and together offer important new insights into our understanding of the area.

Starting from the theory of scriptural interpretation elaborated by Hugh of St Victor, the Augustinian Canons of twelfth-century St Victor in Paris were leading theorists and practitioners of scriptural exegesis. This volume contains translations of the exegetical theories elaborated in Hugh of St Victor's (d. 1141) Didascalicon, On Sacred Scripture and its Authors, The Diligent Examiner, and On the Sacraments (prologues); Andrew of St Victor's (d. 1175) prologues to select commentaries; Richard of St Victor's (d. 1173) Book of Notes and Apocalypse commentary; Godfrey of St Victor's Fountain of Philosophy; Robert of Melun's Sentences; and the anonymous Speculum on the Mysteries of the Church.

The editors of this volume are Franklin T. Harkins (PhD, Notre Dame; Theology Dept. Fordham University), author of Reading and the Work of Restoration: History and Scripture in the Theology of Hugh of St Victor (2009) and Frans van Liere (PhD, Groningen; Dept. of History, Calvin College), editor of Andrew of St Victor’s commentaries on Samuel and Kings (1996 ; ET 2010) and on the Twelve Prophets (2007, with Mark Zier) (Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis), and author of a forthcoming book on the Bible in the Middle Ages.

Les prolégomènes à la philosophie a été le tout premier ouvrage abordé par les étudiants en philosophie dans l’Antiquité tardive. Cette œuvre, à caractère propédeutique et déclinée en plusieurs versions au fil des générations, nous donne un bon aperçu du raffinement pédagogique qui était alors en usage dans l’école néoplatonicienne. Les définitions et les divisions de la philosophie qu’on y lisait avaient pour but de donner un avant-goût du cursus philosophique et de l’orientation exégétique adoptée par l’enseignant. Cette littérature isagogique dont l’influence s’est étendue jusqu’aux sphères culturelles de langue arabe et syriaque, reste encore le « parent pauvre » des études néoplatoniciennes, alors qu’elle renferme encore des aspects méconnus qui demandent à être élucidées et approfondis. Ce volume, qui réunit cinq contributions, vise donc à clarifier certaines questions clés susceptibles d’apporter un éclairage nouveau sur la naissance, l’évolution et la diffusion de cette œuvre représentative du savoir-faire pédagogique de l’Antiquité tardive.

During the Middle Ages, new past narratives emerged, but several of these narratives are not based on the archaeological rediscovery of a lost history. On the contrary, in many cases that impression of a unique, grandiose, and ancient past is partly the result of accurate dissimulation. Yet, it would not be exact to consider the myth of Venice as a fiction or, somehow, as a fabricated invention – an apocryphal creation that does not include any historical component. Instead, the myth of Venice has been generated through an intricate operation of composing unconnected pieces, through a process of attributing new meanings to previously unconnected pieces of different histories or objects from other pasts. The result is a patchwork that, through the longue durée, has been articulated around both new and ancient stories, local and foreign myths, reconstructed or rediscovered objects and narratives. By the late Middle Ages Venice becomes the main stage of a national and international myth: while enhancing its historical role in the past, the city demonstrates the legitimacy of its role in the present. In light of such phenomenon, this volume will try to demonstrate that Venetian past narratives bring together heterogeneous materials to achieve a common result: that of celebrating Venice’s triumph and erasing its weaknesses and defeats.