Brepols

During the seventeenth century Dutch influence on the Baltic region, both economic and aesthetic, was unrivaled. In the wake of the Dutch monopoly on Baltic trade, cultural contacts between the Dutch Republic and the Baltic world flourished. The Dutch Republic was even to fulfil an exemplary function in the Baltic world (particularly in the Swedish Empire, the dominating power in the region), not solely limited to the commerce of commodities but extending to the domain of architecture and art as well.

In this intensive cultural traffic, an important role was set aside for Dutch immigrants, architects, artists, and their agents. Apart from their regular activities as diplomats or news correspondents, agents mediated in cultural affairs for patrons in the North. As such, they occupied a key role in the relations between the Baltic world and the Dutch Republic. The pivotal element in these networks, they negotiated between Baltic commissioners and Dutch architects, artists, and suppliers of luxury items, including sculptures, tapestries, paintings, as well as a wide range of books and prints - all of which were available on the Amsterdam market. These extensive networks mark the Dutch Republic as a major centre of architecture, art, and information, crucial to the cultural development of northern Europe.

The history of this lively trade in good taste is told on the basis of rich archival material, including drawings, book and art collection inventories, correspondence, travel journals, and diaries.

Badeloch Noldus is a Senior Researcher at Frederiksborg Castle, the Danish Museum of National History. Her interests cover art, agency and art trade in early modern Northern Europe. Recent publications include Your Humble Servant. Agents in Early Modern Europe (2006).

Dans les premières années du XIVe siècle, Jean de Saint-Victor entreprend la rédaction d'une chronique qu'il fait précéder d'une courte description des régions et des royaumes. Conduit à réviser ce travail et à lui donner l'envergure d'une histoire universelle depuis la Création, désormais intitulée Memoriale historiarum, il développe l'introduction initiale en un véritable traité, fruit d'une réflexion longuement mûrie au contact des sources sollicitées pour l'élaboration de son premier texte. Il y expose, à l'aide de tous les exemples historiques qu'il a pu rassembler, ce qui lui apparaît commun l'une des lois fondamentales de l'histoire, la divisio regnorum : tels des organismes naturels, les royaumes, mais aussi les empires, naissent, vivent et meurent. Ainsi fait-il place à la pensée aristotélicienne dans une lecture traditionnellement augustinienne de l'Histoire sainte.

Le traité De predicatione crucis, composé vers 1266-1268 par Humbert de Romans, le cinquième maître général de l’ordre dominicain, est sans doute l’instruction la plus détaillée pour les prédicateurs de la croix dont nous disposons. L’auteur donne ses commentaires sur les questions qu’il croit d’être les plus essentielles pour prêcher la croisade, sans pourtant donner des sermons prêts à être prononcés: le prédicateur est censé composer le sermon lui-même en utilisant le traité comme manuel. Il procure aussi des extraits de la Bible et des textes non-bibliques pour le même but.

Le texte latin, dont on trouvera ici la traduction, a été édité dans Humbertus de Romanis, De predicatione crucis (Corpus Christianorum. Continuatio Mediaeualis 279). Des renvois aux pages correspondantes de l'édition sont fournis dans les marges de cette publication.

This volume, the first in the new series Transcultural Medieval Studies, draws together scholars from around the world to offer new insights into the importance and role of the Bible across the varied cultures of medieval Europe. The papers gathered here take a comparative and multidisciplinary approach to the subject, focusing on the biblical background of perceptions of the religious and cultural ‘Self ’ and ‘Other’ in the Mediterranean, in Latin Europe, and in the Baltic. In doing so, the contributions identify commonalities and differences of the ‘uses of the Bible’ in these various worlds, combining and contrasting studies on Bible manuscripts, their exegesis, and their use for historical writing.

The thematic framework of this special issue is an examination of the impact Russian émigrés had on the humanities and art. From art history to philosophy, artistic creation to ecumenical dialogue, the volume is dedicated to figures who, through their emigration from Russia, transformed their places of arrival and relevant fields. The articles in the volume assess these topics from an interdisciplinary point of view, extending the usual horizons of Convivium to other fields as well. The volume was published as the proceedings of the conference Transformed by Emigration. Welcoming Russian Intellectuals, Scientists, and Artists 1917-1945 held at the Hans Belting Library in February 2019.

Transforming Space deals with visible and invisible changes in premodern cities, their causes and the way in which they were perceived and received. The chapters in this book analyse the development and management of urban space, combining case studies and insights from a range of cities from all over Europe. Several contributions deal with the impact of major events on the urban tissue: geopolitics; disasters such as fires or wars; expropriation or redevelopment projects directed by urban governments; religious change such as the Dissolution in England, and the Reformation and Counter-Reformation on the continent. On closer scrutiny, however, some of these major events were only an accelerator of already ongoing processes of change. By shifting the perspective from the city as a whole, to neighbourhoods, urban blocks or even plots of land, other chapters reveal how functional change or real estate dynamics changed the urban landscape almost imperceptibly. This book is written from a comparative perspective that takes into account path-dependency. Pre-existing power relations, ideology and mentality, the resilience of property structures, the impact of building regulations, subsidies, or the effects of real estate markets are shown to have had different outcomes for different social groups and the evolution of neighbourhoods.

The transitions of the title are those in the life and intellectual development of one of the leading historians of late antiquity and Byzantium. Averil Cameron recounts her working-class origins in North Staffordshire and how she came to read Classics at Oxford and start her research at Glasgow University before moving to London and teaching at King’s College London. Later she was the head of Keble College Oxford at a time of change in the University and its colleges. She played a leading role in projects and organisations even as the flow of books and articles continued, in an array of publications that have been fundamental in shaping the disciplines of late antiquity and Byzantine studies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The volume deals with the issue of translation automatisms in early vernacular texts predating 1650. It introduces the novel concept of ‘translation clusters’, first defined in machine translation theory, but equally considering a wider array of situations that involve ‘translation units’, ‘language automatisms’, ‘culturemes’, and ‘formulaic borrowings’ in vernacular texts. Contrary to contemporary languages, where translation units, clusters, and automatisms appear frequently due to the influence of standard language varieties or dialects, the vernacular idioms of the Middle Ages and Early Modern period are often pluricentric. Consequently, automatisms are limited to specific cases where diachronic, diatopic, diastratic, and diaphasic variants align similarly in two otherwise different translations. This is a crucial topic for philology, as it can explain accidents that ecdotic methods tend to mistake for variant readings of a single ‘redactio’. The volume aims to determine the organic interplay between three primary situations in which common coincidences between translations or texts occur. Firstly the volume explores the shared elements resulting from the transfer of textual units between multiple translations or adaptations (quotations, corrections, formulas). Secondly chapters study the shared elements arising from the existence of a common source text (translation clusters, based on translation units); and lastly, the volume questions the fixed, inherent, and unchangeable aspects of the target language (language automatisms, often coinciding with translation units). The chapters of this volume focus on numerous vernacular languages and a multitude of case studies, with a particular emphasis on biblical translation—a cornerstone of contemporary translation studies. The chapter format encourages diverse perspectives to push the boundaries of philology, translation studies, and “vernacular theologies”.

The nineteenth century saw the rapid development of textual criticism for establishing the “best” and “most authentic” forms of both Ancient and Mediaeval texts thanks to the method perfected by Karl Lachmann, who based himself on the insights gained during the eighteenth century. Lachmann’s method has been further refined by later philologists, with, most interestingly, the use of computers in establishing the mutual relations of manuscript witnesses since the last decades of the twentieth century. However, the interest in what form the texts, both Ancient and Mediaeval, were actually circulating in the Late Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, has been slow to emerge as an area of scholarly interest. In other words: what did the readers actually get in front of their eyes, and acted upon as, say, doctors, historians, theologians between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries?

This volume explores the Late Medieval and Renaissance transmission of texts of different genres, languages and periods from the book historical point of view, taking into consideration not only the textual but also the material aspect of the traditions.

The authors include eminent specialists as well as mid- and early career scholars.

1066 is one of the most well-known dates in English history: but how far do we understand the mental and emotional lives of those who experienced it? In just over a month, England was rocked by two separate invasions, multiple pitched battles, and the deaths of thousands. The repercussions of these traumatic events would echo through the history and literature of northern Europe for centuries to come.

Drawing on studies of trauma and cultural memory, this book examines the cultural repercussions of the year 1066 in medieval England, Normandy, and Scandinavia. It explores how writers in all three regions celebrated their common heritage and mourned the wars that brought them into conflict. Bringing together texts from an array of languages, genres, and cultural traditions, this study examines the strategies medieval authors employed to work through the traumas of 1066, narrating its events and experiences in different forms. It explores the ways in which history and memory interacted through multiple generations of writers and readers, and reveals how the field of trauma studies can help us better understand the mental and emotional lives of medieval people.

This collection of research, which brings together contributions from scholars around the world, reflects the range and variety of work that is currently being undertaken in the field of travel and mobility in the European Middle Ages. The essays draw on diverse methodological approaches, from the archival and literary to the art historical and archaeological. The collection focuses not just on key medieval modes of travel and mobility, but also on themes whose relevance continues to resonate in the modern world. Topics touched upon include religious and diplomatic journeys, migration, mobility and governance, gendered mobilities, material culture and mobility, mobility and disability, travel and status, and notions of home and abroad. Broad themes are approached through case studies of individuals, families, and groups, ranging from kings, queens, and nobles to friars, exiles, and students. The geographical reach of the collection is particularly broad, encompassing travellers from Southern, Western, Northern, Central and Eastern Europe and journeys to destinations as diverse as Scandinavia, the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, and the Indian Ocean. A wide-ranging and detailed introduction situates the collection in its scholarly context.

Discovered by the French scholar, Marcel Richard, on one of his photographic expeditions to the monastic libraries of Mount Athos, the Thesaurus was entrusted to a young scholar, Joseph Munitiz, who prepared the editio princeps for his doctoral thesis, defended at the Sorbonne in 1976. The work was shown to have been composed by a little-known spiritual author, thought to have been active in the fourteenth century, but placed, thanks to a passing reference in his Treasury, in the middle of the thirteenth century. This semi-encyclopaedic work was intended to provide an overview of the sort of knowledge considered essential for a young prince, as one chapter is an exhortation to a future emperor. Thus it contains a summary of the Old Testament, with curious reflections (e.g. on female wickedness and the ingenuity of Solomon), and chapters on dogmatic questions: the divinity of Christ; the value of Holy Scripture; the sacraments, icons, the Theotokos, and the key role of the Ecumenical Councils. A large part is made up of moral exhortations attributed partly to Amphilochios and backed by pious stories. There are also florilegia, so popular in Byzantine spiritual writings, focused around the eucharist, the priesthood, sexual morality and confession. At the end, some questions-and-answers (another popular Byzantine genre) deal with items of general knowledge (ranging from theology, through astronomy, to alms-giving). In general, the work opens a window into the mind of the ordinary believer in mediaeval Constantinople.

The source text of this volume appeared with the title Theognosti Thesaurus as volume 5 in Corpus Christianorum Series graeca, in 1979. References to the corresponding pages of the edition are provided in the margin of this translation, along with a list of corrections of the Greek.

For centuries, the Council of Trent has been studied as a fundamental episode in European history wherein doctrinal and institutional unity was lost. Although the Council decrees nowhere refer to the contexts of the peoples met by Christopher Columbus, nor to the Cathay regions rediscovered by missionaries, nor to their religions, their superstitions or their political systems, the Council was nonetheless a global event. The Roman Church, which lost doctrinal control of the considerable part of Europe captured by different forms of Protestantism, imposed itself upon its followers through the application of conciliar decrees. Freed of its exclusively European perspective it opened up to cultures of the rest of the world. The customs and traditions thus encountered, the relationships with political authorities, possibilities for the construction of a new Christianity offered by New Worlds, disclosing spaces and contexts to the Tridentine Church, with accommodations and cross-fertilizations, with a return to origins and tradition, obliged that it begin to think of itself, perhaps for the first time, as a universal Church.

The Council and Beyond suggests not only reconsideration of Europe through the prism of the Tridentine decrees and the long processes of their dissemination, but also through an intercontinental consideration, a spatial perspective that would become universal to the Church and to the normative texts that had been elaborated at Trent.

In 1517, the Brabant city of Louvain witnessed the foundation of the Collegium Trilingue (Three Language College). Funded by means of the legacy of the humanist and diplomat Jerome of Busleyden (d. 1517) and steered by guiding spirit Erasmus of Rotterdam, this institute offered courses in the three so-called sacred languages Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, which students could attend for free. However, this kind of initiative was not unique to Louvain in the early 16th century. In a time span of barely twenty years, Greek and Hebrew were also offered in Alcalá de Henares (near Madrid), Wittenberg, and Paris, among other places. It would not take long before these ‘sacred’ languages were also on the educational agenda at universities throughout the whole of Europe.

The present volume examines the general context in which such polyglot institutes emerged and thrived, as well as the learning and teaching practices observed in these institutes and universities. Devoting special attention to the study of the continuity, or rather the discontinuity, between the 16th-century establishment of language chairs and the late medieval interest in these languages, it brings together fifteen selected papers exploring various aspects of these multilingual undertakings, focusing on their pedagogical and scholarly dimensions. Most of the contributions were presented at the 2017 LECTIO conference The Impact of Learning Greek, Hebrew, and ‘Oriental’ Languages on Scholarship, Science, and Society in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which was organized at the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the foundation of the Louvain Collegium Trilingue.

This book offers unprecedented insights into the richness of Scottish culture in the early modern period, studying triumphal entries — that is, processional civic welcomes offered to royal guests — staged in Edinburgh in the period between 1500 and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Based on a comprehensive and imaginative analysis of the written and archival sources available for these events, it also brings renewed attention to the country’s artistic, architectural, and literary traditions. The analysis of comparable events staged in England and continental Europe — in France, the Italian peninsula, and the Low Countries — helps frame Scotland’s distinctiveness within a network of international connections. The book explores how the urban space of early modern Edinburgh was employed with changing fortunes to address potentially explosive power dynamics, expressed by civic and royal, secular and religious (pre and post Reformation), Scottish and post-1603 pan-British worldviews. Scottish triumphal culture is presented as profoundly embedded in the urban context within which it is set, rich in politicised rituals of negotiation and mutual acknowledgement, and visually vibrant through temporary structures, decorations, pageants, and costumed performers. This book offers a well-rounded answer to the still relevant question of Scottish identity, and how identity and power — individual, communal, national, royal — can be performed through active engagement with civic space.

Dissent, polemics and rivalry have always been at the centre of intellectual development. The scholarly Streitkultur was given a fresh impetus by the newly founded universities in the High Middle Ages and later turned into a quintessential part of early modern intellectual life, with the emergence of the Protestant Reformation creating a new momentum. It was not only mirrored in various well-known intellectual disputations and controversies, but also embodied in numerous literary genres and non-literary modes of expression, as well as discursive or political strategies. Moreover, the harsh debates notwithstanding, consensus was also actively searched for, both within particular disciplines and within society as a whole.

This volume collects thirteen contributions offering a very rich variety of topics with regard to the negotiation of disagreements from the twelfth till the eighteenth centuries. They reflect inter alia upon the rules and conventions of the intellectual debate, upon the media used to negotiate dissent, as well as upon the role of formal institutions created to judge and decide in cases of dissent. The contributions are offered by scholars from fields as diverse as history of literature, political history, history of philosophy, history of Church and theology, and legal history.

Throughout the nineteenth, and for much of the twentieth century, archives were considered to be containers of knowledge, holding material that was deemed to be objective and unbiased. In more recent years, however, as scholars have begun to engage more with archival material, this perception has changed, and archives have increasingly been recognized as sites of contention, holding curated historical documents — a re-evaluation that, in turn, has led to a new understanding of the role and significance of both archives and archiving practices, as well as to revived interest in their contents.

Taking renewed scholarly interest in archives as its starting point, this volume highlights the importance of archival material both as a source of study, and as a way of unleashing hitherto ‘lost’ knowledge. The chapters gathered here present previously unpublished material for the first time, as well as offer new insights into archival and curatorial practices. Through this approach, the authors not only reveal unknown aspects and histories of both past and ongoing excavations, but also shed light on the creation processes of an archive, an element that is typically lost by the time the material is designated as an archive by those who study it. The result is a volume that can shape best archival practices and approaches for the future.

The clash between Pope Paul II ( 1464-1471) and Bologna was one of two opposed concepts of government and 'state'. Paul II held to a high concept of princely sovereignty, and to a vision of the papal temporal dominions as a genuinely co-ordinated territorial state, an enduring public; entity. Inevitably he clashed with the Commune of Bologna, second city of the Papal State, over which he aspired to more jurisdiction. The political vision of the Bolognese regime had a. local focus which precluded the sacrifice of independence in favour of integration into a wider entity, and sprang from a view of government as rightfully the private preserve of a restricted oligarchic group, from the 1440s consolidated in the magistracy of the 'Sixteen Reformers of the Regime of Liberty'. Paul II regarded the regime of the Sixteen as a 'tyranny', and declared that no such ty rannies should flourish 'under the mantle of St Peter'. But his intervention failed and, instead, Paul modified the constitution which gave the long-developing predominance of the Bentivoglio family an institutional basis. This 'signorial' regime aggravated the tension between collegiality and despotism and paved the way for the eventual destruction of the Bentivoglio dominance and later the fuller incorporation in the sixteenth century of Bologna into the Papal State.

People have been living in Uist’s island landscapes for millennia; shaping and shaped by the unique environments of machair and moorland we see today. Uist Unearthed tells the story of 5000 years of the islands’ prehistory and history through five key archaeological sites.

Based on the award-winning Uist Virtual Archaeology Project, this interactive book brings Uist’s past to life. Readers are invited to dig deeper and discover Uist’s unique archaeology through colourful and creative mixed media including illustrations, infographics, and photography, enhanced with state-of-the-art augmented reality.

This book provides an excellent introduction to Uist’s archaeology for novices and professionals alike. It discusses the importance of Gaelic language and culture in our interpretation and understanding of archaeological landscapes. It is for all those interested in exploring alternative ways of reimagining, interpreting, and presenting the past through digital storytelling.

Le Moyen Âge a inlassablement commenté le Cantique des cantiques comme dialogue spirituel entre l'âme et son Époux divin. Superposer à cette mystique nuptiale la mystique métaphysique du Pseudo-Denys fut une initiative du victorin Thomas Gallus, promise à une grande faveur dans le monde cartusien. Le présent commentaire du Cantique («Deiformis animae gemitus»), s'inscrit dans cette tradition, en y ajoutant l'expression d'une dévotion au Christ crucifié aux accents franciscains. Un temps attribué à Thomas Gallus lui-même, l'ouvrage doit probablement être restitué à un autre religieux de son abbaye, un «Vercellensis» dont nous ne saurons peut-être jamais le nom complet. L'édition princeps jadis procurée par Jeanne Barbet a été revue et remaniée grâce à un nouveau recours aux manuscrits et assortie d'une traduction française due au P. Francis Ruello.

Pierre naît à Vérone, au tournant du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle, d’une famille cathare. Il est dit « de Vérone » ou « Martyr ». Il étudie à Bologne, où il rencontre les frères prêcheurs et entre dans l’ordre, en recevant l’habit probablement des mains de saint Dominique lui-même, vers 1220 ou 1221. Son activité essentielle est celle de prédicateur itinérant. Il prêche à Rome, à Florence, dans la Romagne et la Marche d’Ancône, à Venise et en Toscane, et peut-être même à Paris. En juin 1251, Innocent IV le charge d’une mission contre les hérétiques de Crémone. Quelques mois plus tard, en septembre 1251, il devient inquisiteur pontifical à Milan, à Côme et dans leurs districts. Il assume cette tâche pendant les derniers mois de sa vie. Le 6 avril 1252, il est tué sur le chemin de Côme à Milan par un tueur à gages, loué par les hérétiques. Pierre est canonisé le 9 mars 1253.

Le présent livre contient neuf versions de sa légende, rédigées en français ancien (XIIIe-XVe siècles) par des auteurs anonymes. Les textes, qui procèdent du chapitre 61 de la Légenda aurea de Jacques de Voragine, n’ont jusqu’à présent jamais été édités. Dans la majorité des cas, on a affaire à des adaptations libres, parfois très libres, de la vita contenue dans la Legenda aurea, pour lesquelles celle-ci n’est qu’un point de départ. Il s’agit de textes autonomes : chacun des auteurs a exploité sa source à sa propre façon ; ce sont des jeux de la variante, tellement caractéristiques de la littérature médiévale.

Achard de Saint-Victor (†1171) est un représentant moins connu de l’école de Saint-Victor, élève d’Hugues, chanoine régulier, maître, abbé de Saint-Victor à Paris (1155-1161), évêque d’Avranches (1161-1171). Son œuvre principal, le De unitate et pluralitate creaturarum, consiste en deux parties qui portent sur la doctrine trinitaire et sur la doctrine de la pluralité des raisons éternelles dans le Verbe de Dieu.

Cette recherche entend rétablir les thèses principales exposées par Achard de Saint-Victor dans son livre De unitate et pluralitate creaturarum pour montrer que les capacités métaphysiques de ce penseur ne le cèdent pas aux philosophes plus connus de son époque. Notamment, l’autrice étudie la façon dont le De unitate recourt aux doctrines médio et néoplatoniciennes pour résoudre la question d’une coexistence de l’unité et de la pluralité en Dieu et dans les créatures. L’enjeu est de mieux comprendre la place de la métaphysique platonicienne dans l’école de Saint-Victor, et ce malgré la rareté des sources au XIIe siècle, en particulier des œuvres de Platon ou de ses disciples grecs.

Le présent ouvrage contribue à résoudre deux problèmes de l’histoire de la philosophie : quels éléments et sources platoniciens ont été reçus au XIIe siècle et quelle place la pensée victorine fait à l’héritage platonicien. Les problèmes philosophiques soulevés sont la multiplication des objets intelligibles et sensibles, la définition de la chose et l’identité des êtres.

S’il est difficile d’ignorer les chapitres nobles lorsqu’on aborde l’histoire des noblesses européennes au xviii e siècle, notamment dans les rapports qu’elles entretenaient avec l’Église, ces instituts restent toutefois peu étudiés. Plus marqué que pour les chapitres nobles masculins, le dynamisme de ceux de femmes intrigue. Le cas des chapitres nobles de chanoinesses de Franche-Comté, demeurés réguliers en un siècle qui ne passe pas pour avoir été favorable à l’Église régulière, comme le confirme la sécularisation d’un certain nombre de ces compagnies, est très éclairant sur les raisons de leur faveur. Celle-ci ne réside pas dans cette fonction d’asile et de secours matériel à destination d’une ancienne noblesse paupérisée que décrivaient leurs contemporains, mais dans leurs réponses précoces aux attentes de reconnaissance d’un groupe social convaincu de son déclin ainsi que dans leur aptitude à contenter une spiritualité en phase avec celle des Lumières et adaptable à la personnalité de chaque dame noble. L’effort accompli par les chapitres de chanoinesses, à l’apogée de la Réforme post-tridentine, pour conserver et développer leur spécificité en dépit de l’hostilité du clergé nous conduit par ailleurs à relativiser le concept de « Dorsale catholique » toujours très débattu chez les historiens, la plupart de ces établissements étant pourtant implantés dans ce front de catholicité identifié par René Taveneaux, reliant les anciens Pays-Bas à l’Italie du Nord.

This book investigates how medieval and early modern Europeans constructed, understood, and articulated emotions. The essays trace concurrent lines of influence that shaped post-Classical understandings of emotions, through overlapping philosophical, rhetorical, and theological discourses. They show the effects of developments in genre and literary, aesthetic, and cognitive theories on depictions of psychological and embodied emotion in literature. They map the deeply embedded emotive content inherent in rituals, formal documents, daily conversation, communal practice, and cultural memory. The contributors focus on the mediation and interpretation of pre-modern emotional experience in cultural structures and institutions - customs, laws, courts, religious foundations - as well as in philosophical, literary, and aesthetic traditions.

The volume thus represents a conspectus of contemporary interpretative strategies, displaying close connections between disciplinary and interdisciplinary critical practices drawn from historical studies, literature, anthropology and archaeology, philosophy and theology, cognitive science, psychology, religious studies, and gender studies. The essays stretch from classical and indigenous cultures to the contemporary West, embracing numerous national and linguistic groups. They illuminate the complex potential of medieval and early modern emotions in situ, analysing their involvement in subjects as diverse as philosophical theories, imaginative and scholarly writing, concepts of individual and communal identity, social and political practices, and the manifold business of everyday life.

Les nouveautés culturelles qui se répandent en Europe latine aux xii e et xiii e siècles sont les expressions les plus hautes d’une longue période de croissance. Bien que déjà largement documentée, cette expansion pluriséculaire mérite d’être reprise et précisée.

Un cercle vertueux s’est enclenché aux alentours de l’an mil dans l’Europe latine, sans qu’il y ait simultanéité de dates et de rythmes sur tout le territoire. Pour être multiples, les composantes de cet essor se réduisent à un même thème: ce sont autant de triomphes de l’homme européen sur son environnement et sur lui-même: amélioration de l’outillage et des techniques agricoles, poussée démographique, défrichements, nouveaux sites de peuplement, renouveau urbain, renforcement de l’artisanat, essor de l’économie monétaire, développement et diffusion de l’écrit, promotion des langues vernaculaires.

Véhicule déterminant du nouveau savoir, les traductions surviennent dans un monde latin à l’essor multiforme. Elles l’accompagnent et le transfigurent. Elles en décuplent les possibilités. Elles expriment un engouement dévorant pour l’étude, dont en retour elles accroissent l’intensité et rehaussent le niveau. Les clercs sont aspirés par cette spirale, dont le terme marque la fin du Moyen Âge. Les acquis des siècles précédents servent aux hommes du xv e à renouer directement avec l’hellénisme et avec le classicisme latin, tout en franchissant les océans d’une terre maintenant centrée sur le soleil.

La polysémie du mot «monde» rend compte de la totalité des nouveautés qui, apparues au cours du xii e siècle de Europe latine, transforment en quelques cent ans le continent: le xii e siècle latin s’est transfiguré en véritable Nouveau Monde.