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.

Entre le dernier quart du XIIIe siècle et le premier tiers du XIVe siècle, les banquiers piémontais installés dans le duché de Brabant constituèrent la communauté la plus importante des Lombards actifs dans les anciens Pays-Bas. Banquiers du Prince, ils prêtaient également aux élites urbaines et à la noblesse. Cette étude s’attache à reconstituer les stratégies commerciales et les réseaux sociaux des financiers piémontais grâce auxquels ceux-ci jouèrent un rôle de premier plan dans l’économie et la politique du duché de Brabant. En s’interrogeant sur les modalités d’intégration des Piémontais dans les villes brabançonnes, l’étude a finalement pour ambition de dépasser l’image caricaturale du Lombard, souvent identifié à un usurier public.

David Kusman , docteur en histoire médiévale de l’Université Libre de Bruxelles, est chercheur associé à l’Unité de Recherche en histoire rurale et urbaine (U.L.B.) et au PAI VII/26 "City and Society in the Low Countries (1200-1850)

This first volume of the Silk Roads Studies is a reference manual of the published Uygur Buddhist literature. Uygur Buddhist Literature creates a complete inventory of the published Uygur Buddhist texts along with a bibliography of the pertinent scholarlyliterature. The work includes an introduction that outlines the history of the discovery of the Uygur Buddhist Literature and a short history of the Buddhist Uygurs and their translation activities. The survey of the literature itself is divided into six sections: (1) Non-Mahayana Texts, including Sutra, Vinaya, Abhidarma, Biographies of the Buddha (including Jatakas) and Avadana; (2) Mahayana Sutras; (3) Commentaries; (4) Chinese Apocrypha; (5) Tantric Texts (6) Other Buddhist Works. Included under each title of a text is a brief synopsis of the text and an explanation of the Uygur manuscript, including where known: origin of translation, the translator and the place of translation, the place it was found, and any other interesting points. After this brief survey of the manuscript, the signature of the manuscript with references to the editions of the text is provided as well as additional references to the secondary literature. The survey concludes with an index to titles, translators, scribes and sponsors. This manual is an essential tool not only for specialists in the field of Altaic, especially Turcological or Monogolian, Iranological, Sinological or Buddhological Studies, but is also written for a larger public of students interested in Asian religions and cultural history in general. This book provides in a systematic and exhaustive way the most recent information on the places where the documents are kept, a synopsis of the text, editions and secondary literature.

In the modern world, interest in religious devotion is as great as ever. This volume brings together the research of ten scholars into the diverse ways that Europeans expressed their quest for God over more than a millennium, from the formative centuries of Christianity up to the seventeenth century. Topics include women transvestite saints, Monophysite wall-paintings, Anglo-Saxon sainthood and painful martyrdom, Carmelite self-redefinition, the confident authorship of Gautier de Coinci and Matfre Ermengaud, competition between the bishop and a wandering preacher for popular favor in Le Mans, the contemplative philanthropies of the Poor Clares, Chester Nativity-cycle actors’ masculinity, Jean Gerson’s warm relations with his siblings, and George Herbert’s Eucharistic feeling. The authors’ profound familiarity with primary sources as well as the influence of current theory makes these essays vibrant and timely.

This volume is the result of a workshop organized in Leuven within the context of the Australian Catholic University-KU Leuven-Tilburg University project on Vatican II (1962-1965). This volume focuses on the preparatory period of the Council and its broader context, for many renewal movements were underway decades before the Council's opening. The preparation of the Council was also a period of intense consultation of bishops and male superiors of religious orders and congregations. Indeed, John XXIII aimed at introducing an aggiornamento in the Roman Catholic Church, taking into account the wishes and the needs of bishops and superiors. The volume presented here offers new insights about this period on the basis of archives and other materials insufficiently consulted to date. The papers presented are the result of research by both senior scholars and junior researchers. They focus on the following issues: revelation, ecclesiology, ecumenism, and education.

In this volume the McGill University Research Group on Transmission, Translation, and Transformation in Medieval Cultures and their collaborators initiate a new reflection on the dynamics involved in receiving texts and ideas from the antiquity or from other contemporary cultures. For all their historic specificity, the western European, Arab/Islamic and Jewish civilizations of the Middle Ages were nonetheless co-participants in a complex web of cultural transmission that operated via translation and inevitably involved the transformation of what had been received. This threefold process is what defines medieval intellectual history. Every act of transmission presumes the existence of some ‘efficient cause’ – a translation, a commentary, a book, a library etc. Such vehicles of transmission, however, are not passive containers in which cultural products are transported. On the contrary: the vehicles themselves select, shape, and transform the material transmitted, making ancient or alien cultural products usable and attractive in another milieu. The case studies contained in this volume attempt to bring these larger processes into the foreground. They lay the groundwork for a new intellectual history of medieval civilizations in all their variety, based on the core premise that these shared not only a cultural heritage from antiquity but, more importantly, a broadly comparable ‘operating system’ for engaging with that heritage. Each was a culture of transmission, claiming ownership over the prestigious knowledge inherited from the past. Each depended on translation. Finally, each transformed what it appropriated.

This volume includes a collection of reworked articles which the author, during the last twenty years, dedicated to the origins and conditions constitutive of Christian philosophical-theological thought. From the earliest centuries of the Christian era, human reason was submitted to a particular formal conditioning, in so far as it was necessarily obliged to confront the contents of a divine revelation recognized as necessarily ‘true’. The medieval Latin scholar was induced by the social and cultural peculiarities of his time to confront a model of thought which imposes a decisive subordination of natural knowledge - demonstrated to be imperfect and inconclusive - to the certainties assured by the faith. The production of this model of philosophia, significantly different from the dominant paradigms in the classical period, rooted itself in the critical redimensioning of reason which Cicerointroduced into the West. Departing from the observation of the failure of the philosophical aspirations of antiquity, the Christian intellectuals effected an operative ‘overturning’ of the conditions of veridical knowledge.

The new wisdom was not entirely the result of religion interfering in the field of rational science, but it was shaped by a conscious ‘conversion’ of the philosophers and reached fulfillment under two principles: faith, which requires earthly knowledge in order to defend itself from misunderstandings and heresies; and reason, which allows itself to draw upon supernatural revelation for the possession of regulatory principles which guide it in the study of natural things.

This book investigates the development of this approach during the course of the centuries which in the West precede the rediscovery of Aristotelian epistemology: from Augustine to Boethius, from John Scottus Eriugena to Anselm of Aosta. It concludes by describing the return of this methodological approach, at the end of the Medieval Scholastic period, in the results of the anti-Aristotelian critique carried out by the men of the Renaissance through the recovery of a model of thought which had dominated in the Patristic and Early Medieval periods.

En devenant le principal support pédagogique des grammatici, l’œuvre de Virgile a joué un rôle central dans la formation intellectuelle de la jeunesse lors de l’Antiquité romaine tardive, y compris dans la formation rhétorique : les discours - principalement ceux de l’Énéide - ont fourni aux commentateurs du grand poète l’occasion d’expliquer des notions rhétoriques et d’analyser des exemples précis de situations oratoires. Les contributions du présent volume explorent les différentes facettes de cet art virgilien de la parole, tel qu’il a été compris par les professionnels de la littérature et de l’éducation de l’Antiquité tardive.

This book provides a richly documented study of vernacular translators as agents within the literary culture of Italy during the fifteenth century. Through a fresh and careful examination of these early modern translators, Rizzi shows how humanist translators went about convincing readers of the value of their work in disseminating knowledge that would otherwise be inaccessible to many. The translators studied in this book include not only the well-known ‘superstars’ such as Leonardo Bruni, but also little-known and indeed obscure writers from throughout the Italian peninsula.

Rizzi demonstrates that vernacular translation did not cease with the rise of ‘humanism’. Translations from Greek into Latin spurred the concurrent production of ‘new’ vernacular versions. Humanists challenged themselves to produce creative and authoritative translations both from Greek and occasionally from the vernacular into Latin, and from Latin into the vernacular. Translators grew increasingly self-assertive when taking on these tasks.

The findings of this study have wide implications: they trace a novel history of the use of the Italian language alongside Latin in a period when high culture was bilingual. They also shed further light on the topic of Renaissance self-fashioning, and on the workings of the patronage system, which has been studied far less in literary history than in art history. Finally, the book gives welcome emphasis to the concept that the creation and the circulation of translations (along with other literary activities) were collaborative activities, involving dedicatees, friends, and scribes, among others.

The studies collected in this volume highlight the rising of an ecumenical consciousness within the Catholic Church in the early twentieth century. The Catholic paths, suggested in view of the hoped-for Christian unity before the Second Vatican Council, were different but complementary: the path of prayer and liturgy, that of theological refl ection, that of fraternal witness and that of martyrdom. The text offers valuable contributions on all these paths, written by specialists in the history of ecumenism.

The Victorines were scholars and teachers of philosophy, liberal arts, sacred scripture, music, and contemplation at the Abbey of Saint-Victor in Paris. This collection focuses on the three greatest Victorines: Hugh (d. 1141), who established the direction of the school; Richard (d. 1173), who developed Victorine contemplation; and Thomas Gallus (d. 1246), who culminated Victorine contemplative thought and transmitted it to other schools, especially the Franciscans. They offer an innovative revival of the Christian spiritual and intellectual tradition for their reforming pastoral mission in their urban setting and for the Church.

Their contemporaries saw the Victorines as beacons of spiritual love and intellectual richness. Later reformers and thinkers held their writings as touchstones of contemplative love, including, for example, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Jean Gerson, Thomas à Kempis, the Devotio Moderna, and many others. The writings of the Victorines found broad appeal among later medieval readers, as well as praise among early modern reformers, Protestant and Catholic alike. In recent decades, the Victorines have returned to scholarly attention and renewed appreciation. Scholarly studies, critical editions, and translation projects reveal the treasures of Victorine thought and spirituality.

This volume showcases the findings of recent research and scholarly advances in Victorine studies, offering new readers a status quaestionis of the field. It also features new research by eminent experts in Victorine thought that points out promising directions for future research, thus offering important new findings for established specialists.

Hildebert de Lavardin, évêque du Mans (1096-1125), puis archevêque de Tours (1125-1133), l’auteur de la Vita beate Marie Egyptiace, dont nous donnons ici la première traduction française, fut l’une des figures littéraires les plus importantes du Moyen Age: pendant plusieurs générations ses vers furent lus avec plaisir dans toute l’Europe occidentale; ses lettres servirent de modèles dans les écoles cathédrales et monastiques, pour leur élégance et leur noble distinction, et ses traités de philosophie morale et de droit canonique devinrent des manuels universellement appréciés.

La légende de Marie l’Égyptienne, compte parmi les figures du Moyen Age les plus connues et les plus vénérées de celles qui illustrent l’influence salutaire de Notre-Dame sur les plus grands pécheurs; elle a contribué pour une part nullement négligeable au développement du culte marial qui prend son essor définitif en Occident partir de l’époque carolingienne. Marie l’Égyptienne n’est pas seulement l’héroïne d’une parabole « évangélique », mais le personnage-clé d’un drame de la plus brûlante actualité : non seulement elle incarne en sa personne l’aspiration du monde féminin à rejoindre le mouvement des nouveaux ermites de l’époque d’Hildebert, mais elle intervient, en sa qualité d’ermite, pour donner des conseils au monde monastique. Le texte prend place dans la grande discussion de l'époque d'Hildebert sur la hiérarchie des vocations monastiques et leurs mérites respectifs, et sur les origines érémitiques du monachisme chrétien.

Christians have observed vigils in both East and West from earliest times. In the broad liturgical tradition of Christianity, the idea of keeping vigil appears to manifest the Church’s eschatological nature. Documentary evidence from the earliest centuries reveals that some Christians kept a night watch at the graves of martyrs and other heroes of the faith as to anticipate that dawn when the rising Sun of Justice would return in fulfilment of his promise. Eventually, vigils appear not just for Easter, Pentecost and saints’ days, but also for Christmas, the dedication of a church building, and on Saturday evening of the uniquely Roman quarterly Ember Weeks.

Liturgical sources of the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries reveal that such practices became relatively standardized with the assignment of specific Mass texts and scriptural readings, yet we know very little about the precise elements which comprised a vigil liturgy and of their theological significance. At the same time these vigils were so important that they attracted to themselves the celebration of major sacramental liturgies during them. Hence, the Paschal Vigil, which existed for centuries as a vigil liturgy of scriptural readings and prayers gradually became the setting for the annual baptismal celebration. This book examines the nature of Roman vigil liturgies in the early centuries of Christianity to unravel the most primitive structure of keeping vigil and to provide a better understanding of the Paschal Vigil, which Augustine of Hippo affirms as the ‘mother of all vigils.’