Brepols

The mystery of writing is that there is nothing mysterious about it.  If Saramago is right, then it is obvious that palaeography has not yet found all the keys we need if we are to enter amongst the people who gave form to the thoughts and memories of the medieval world.  In order to reveal their identity – the greatest mystery of all – it is sometimes necessary to pass over what has already been written, affirmed and maintained, and to return to the sources instead. The “Memoriali” conserved in the Archivio di Stato in Bologna reveal stories of men and women who created, with pen and quill veritable cathedrals of ink, indelible and sometimes of ineffable beauty. In this volume the names are collected, the commissions listed, where possible the careers and tribulations described of more than 270 copyists documented at Bologna between 1265 and 1270. In short, it is the documentary sources, not the works produced or such as have survived, on which the present  book has been based.

Les ravages corporels et leurs représentations, signes d’outrage aux corps, forment un trait d’union trop souvent négligé entre l’Antiquité et le Moyen Âge. À avoir opposé des civilisations anciennes marquées par un certain « culte de corps » à des sociétés médiévales méprisant la chair, on en aurait presque oublié que le corps y voyage à travers les savoirs, de l'histoire à la littérature, de la science au droit, de la biologie à la théologie et la philosophie. Aussi les sources nous invitent-elles à regarder au-delà des frontières historiques et culturelles qui séparent l'Antiquité et le Moyen Âge. De la plus haute Antiquité au Moyen Âge tardif, chaque outrage au corps physique est lourd de sens: faisant écho dans le corps social, il renvoie aux normes et aux assises de l’ordre politique, affirmant une morale, des valeurs et des croyances qui cimentent les corps constitués dont l’individu n’est qu’une partie. La signification des outrages aux corps diverge suivant la personnalité ou la fonction de celui qui brutalise, comme de celui qui est maltraité. Elle est aussi tributaire du système de représentation du temps et du lieu, du contexte et de l'univers culturel dans lesquels ils s'inscrivent. L’objet de cet ouvrage collectif est de comprendre comment les sociétés antiques et médiévales représentent le modelage du corps humain, à la fois au plan social, mental, politique et religieux, dans l'intention de façonner des individus adaptés à des environnements propres. Il s'agit de saisir comment les outrages et les ravages infligés aux corps physiques et symboliques offrent des clés de compréhension générale de la société qui voit le corps vivre et mourir.

In the civilisations of the Ancient World, where the holy was omnipresent, any undertaking of importance was placed under the aegis of the gods, for no other course of action was conceivable. Humankind addressed the divinity in particular through prayer, a means of communication of which Greek and Latin texts furnish numerous examples. The goal of the present work is to reflect the diversity of these speech acts to the gods in presenting a corpus of Greek and Roman pagan prayer. The authors have selected some two hundred texts covering all of the ancient period and representing different sources and genres : formulaic prayers of rituel, literary prayers in verse and prose, private writings, mystical and magical texts, and so on. They have presented the documents in the original tongue with a new translation and a commentary.

This is the companion volume to the Analytic Bibliography of Greek and Roman Prayer (Bibliographie analytique de la prière grecque et romaine) which began the collection.

Frédéric Chapot and Bernard Laurot, specialists of ancient language and literature, are associate professors at Marc Bloch University of Strasbourg.

Il volume raccoglie 25 studi sulla cosmologia medievale, affrontata nelle sue diverse componenti in un arco di tempo che va da Calcidio al XIV secolo. Dieci contributi investigano questioni di cosmologia ebraica e islamica, in particolare le opere di Gersonide (R. Gatti), Maimonide (L. Pepi), Avicenna (C. Di Martino), Avicenna (O. Lizzini), Sohravardî (I. Panzeca), Qûnawî (P. Spallino), i Fratelli della Purità (C. Baffioni) e le interferenze fra medioevo islamico e latino: la grande questione delle cosmologie alchemiche (M. Pereira), testi tradotti come il De secretis naturae (P. Travaglia), la dottrina del grande anno in Thebit e Pietro d’Abano (F. Seller). All’influenza della Patristica greca sul pensiero occidentale dedicano ampio spazio i lavori di E. S. Mainoldi e R. Gambino. Ulteriori studi presentano lo sviluppo del pensiero cosmologico e scientifico latino a partire da Calcidio (C. Militello), attraverso Adelardo di Bath (P. Palmeri), Guglielmo di Conches (G. Pellegrino) e documenti diversi (A. Tarabochia Canavero) sino alla ripresa dell’aristotelismo fisico, in particolare nei commenti universitari ai Meteorologica (G. Fioravanti), De caelo (C. A. Musatti, A. Vella) e in Dante (M. Gallarino, P. Falzone). La letteratura scientifica in volgare è rappresentata da Restoro d’Arezzo (U. Villani-Lubelli) e Ramon Llull (J. Gayà). A questioni di metodo storiografico è dedicato il saggio di G. Alliney, mentre un magistrale contributo di Tullio Gregory su «Cosmogonia biblica e cosmologie cristiane» traccia idealmente le coordinate generali del complesso problematico affrontato nelle sue diverse sfaccettature dagli autori del volume.

Contemporary historiography holds that it was the practices and technologies underpinning both the Great Voyages and the ‘New Science’, as opposed to traditional book learning, which led to the major epistemic breakthroughs of early modernity. This study, however, returns to the importance of book-learning by exploring how cosmological and cosmographical ‘novelties’ were explained and presented in Renaissance texts, and discloses the ways in which the reports presented by sailors, astronomers, and scientists became not only credible but also deeply disturbing for scholars, preachers, and educated laymen in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France.

It is argued here that dialectic - the art of argumentation and reasoning - played a crucial role in articulating and popularizing new learning about the cosmos by providing the argumentative toolkit needed to define, discard, and authorize novelties. The debates that shaped them were not confined to learned circles; rather, they reached a wider audience via early modern vernacular genres such as the essay.

Focusing both on major figures such as Montaigne or Descartes, as well as on now-forgotten popularizers such as Belleforest and Binet, this book describes the deployment of dialectic as a means of articulating and disseminating, but also of containing, the disturbance generated by cosmological and cosmographical novelties in Renaissance France, whether for the lay reader in Court or Parliament, for the parishioner at Church, or for the student in the classroom.

Qu'est-ce qu'un couple dans le royaume des Francs du haut Moyen Âge ? Quelles en sont les différentes formes ? À quelle réalité sociale correspond-il ? Sur quelles bases s'organisent les relations entre les conjoints ? Comment le discours et les pratiques évoluent-elles entre le VIe et le XIIe siècle ? Pour y répondre, il a fallu croiser des sources de nature diversifiée (narratives, diplomatiques, législatives, morales, administratives, poétiques, épistolaires, iconographiques et archéologiques), analysées à la lumière des questionnements sociologiques, psychologiques, anthropologiques et philosophiques actuels. Il en ressort, même si la conjugalité constitue la norme dans tous les milieux sociaux, une grande diversité de situations et de parcours. Tous les couples n'étaient pas mariés, monogames, formant une communauté de résidence, d'affection et de solidarité hiérarchisée, comme pourrait le laisser supposer la documentation écrite, monopole d'une élite, le plus souvent ecclésiastique, qui tend à présenter comme des normes ce qui n'est qu'un idéal souhaité. Quatre chapitres le montrent en analysant successivement, la diversité des formes de conjugalité, les paramètres qui influent sur le couple et lui permettent ou non de se construire et de durer, sans jamais nier son identité, les éléments qui participent à la construction de la communauté conjugale et l’identifie comme telle, ainsi que la nature et les formes de relations entre les conjoints.

This study represents a new approach to the analysis of early modern court festivals, setting the question of identity at its heart. It explores identity as it was portrayed, constructed, and upheld through court festivals within the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in the period between the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 and the coronation of Friedrich V, Elector Palatine, as King of Bohemia in 1619. Structured thematically, this detailed analysis touches on core themes of early modern European history including state formation, princely courts, gender, religion, science and the natural world, and cultural encounters. In doing so, it draws on, and speaks to, scholarly literature not only from different historical sub-disciplines but also from sociology and anthropology. Ultimately, Morris argues that these court festivals provided a flexible, albeit contested, rhetoric of identity, grounded in the performance of humanist virtue. Through the performed, material, and literary rhetoric of court festivals, the concept of nobility through virtue was reworked, refined, and given a new vocabulary within the German context. This was inextricably linked with politics in light of the reforms made to the Holy Roman Empire at the end of the fifteenth century, the confessional divisions of the sixteenth century, and the mounting tensions of the early seventeenth century which were to culminate in the Thirty Years War.