BOB2022MIOT

Les études qui composent ce recueil ont été prononcées le 6 octobre 2017 au Monastero degli Olivetani de Lecce, en hommage à Giulia Belgioioso, au moment où la fondatrice du Centro Dipartimentale di studi su Descartes ‘Ettore Lojacono’ quittait à la fois son enseignement et la direction du centre qu’elle avait créé.

Le titre qui les réunit - Cartesius edoctus - suffit à dire l’essentiel pour un savant professeur qui a toujours su laisser la première place à celui qui a fait l’objet principal de ses recherches et de ses leçons : mais si elle a inlassablement enseigné Descartes et le cartésianisme, Giulia Belgioioso a aussi fait du Salente un « nouveau royaume » cartésien en y développant ses propres études, en y organisant des rencontres internationales et en établissant, pour parler comme Fénelon, « toutes les plus utiles maximes de gouvernement » pour les recherches des nombreux jeunes chercheurs qu’elle a formés et des équipes qui ont travaillé à l’oeuvre commun, en particulier à l’édition magistrale de Tutte le lettere et des Opere et Opere postume. La fondation du Centro, en 1998, très vite devenu l’alter ego du Centre d’études cartésiennes de la Sorbonne, a fourni le complément institutionnel des avancées méthodologiques évoquées plus haut.

Ce recueil d’articles est un hommage : loin cependant d’être purement formel, il entend se concentrer strictement sur les axes principaux de l’activité de recherche de Giulia Belgioioso. Ce faisant, il révèle en réalité un monde entier : on s’aperçoit en effet immédiatement, ne fût-ce qu’en feuilletant le volume, que les études qui y figurent envisagent les aspects les plus importants à la fois de la philosophie de Descartes et de l’histoire du cartésianisme, comprenant également des documents inédits. La démarche conduit donc de la deuxième Méditation (Igor Agostini) à Paolo Mattia Doria (Jean-Robert Armogathe) ; de la mathesis universalis (Frédéric de Buzon) à Christine de Suède (Carlo Borghero) ; des questions de méthode et de la visée apologétique (Vincent Carraud) à L’Homme (Dan Garber) ; du mythe du solipsisme (Denis Kambouchner) à saint Augustin et Montaigne (Jean-Luc Marion) ; d’un échantillon sur philosophie et médecine dans le XVIIe siècle français (Fabio Sulpizio) aux débats sur l’eucharistie à Port-Royal (Martine Pécharman) et à la condamnation d’un lockien italien (Marta Fattori). Une série de témoignages de collègues, élèves et amis complète l’ouvrage.

In the early modern period, the humanist practice of translation of sacred as well as secular texts created new readerships in the vernacular for authoritative texts, religious or classical. As the circulation of languages within Europe reshuffled hierarchies between classical languages and vernacular tongues, transmission via translation was not only vertical, but also horizontal, and the contacts between European languages enabled the expansion of local lexicons from sources other than Latin or Greek.

This volume focuses on the role of translation and lexical borrowing in the expansion of specific English lexicons (erudite, technical, or artisanal) as evidenced in printed texts from the early modern period. It considers how language shapes identity in social, religious, philosophical, artistic, and literary contexts, and is in turn shaped by claims of social, religious, philosophical, artistic, and literary identity.

Fondé au début de l’été 1969 et labellisé laboratoire associé du CNRS à partir du 1er janvier 1970, le Centre d’études des religions du Livre (CERL), dont est issu l’actuel Laboratoire d’études sur les monothéismes (LEM, UMR 8584), a été créé au tournant crucial des années 1960 et 1970, quand, sous l’impulsion du CNRS, le modèle du laboratoire, exporté depuis le champ des sciences exactes, se généralise pour favoriser l’essor d’investigations collectives également en sciences humaines et sociales.

Dans le vaste mouvement de restructuration de la recherche en cours dans la France d’après Mai 68, les sciences religieuses devaient prendre la place qu’elles méritaient. Les objectifs du CERL se sont alors définis essentiellement selon deux mots d’ordre : procéder à une étude comparative des trois monothéismes classiques (judaïsme, christianisme et islam) ; allier aussi rigoureusement que possible sciences des religions et histoire de la philosophie.

La mémoire collective du CERL a voulu retenir qu’il avait été conjointement fondé par Paul Vignaux (1904-1987), Georges Vajda (1908-1981) et Henry Corbin (1903-1978) - triade savante qui représentait les trois grandes religions du Livre. Henry Corbin a pourtant été l’unique architecte d’un projet dont Paul Vignaux a assuré la réalisation institutionnelle. Le présent ouvrage revient sur un demi-siècle de recherches françaises consacrées à l’étude non confessante des monothéismes.

The Chinese territory is densely meshed with holy sites (mountains, caves, springs...) where the gods manifest themselves and where pilgrims come to meet them. The present volume, the result of a Franco-Japanese conference held in Paris in 2017, includes fifteen chapters in French and English, exploring the conceptions and practices at these holy sites; they build the analysis around the Daoist notion of “grotto-heavens and blessed lands” (dongtian fudi) and its long historical continuity for two millennia while addressing hybridizations with Buddhist and folk practices, and comparing with Japanese holy sites. These case studies cover both the ascetic practices of religious virtuosos and the popular associations whose members dance for the gods on the mountains.

What has driven acts of translation in the past, and what were the conditions that shaped the results? In this volume, scholars from across the humanities interrogate narratives on the process of translation: by historical translators ranging from ancient Babylonia to early modern Japan and the British Empire, and by academics from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries who interpreted these translators’ practices.

In Part 1 the volume authors reflect on the history of the approaches to the phenomenon of translation in their specific fields of competence in order to learn what shaped the academic questions asked, what theoretical and practical tools were deployed, which arguments were privileged, and why certain kinds of evidence (but not others) were thought to be the basis for understanding the function and purpose of all translation performed in a given culture. Part II explores how translators and authors from antiquity to modern times described their own motivations and the circumstances in which they chose to translate. In both parts, the contributors disentangle histories of translation from the specialized intellectual fields (such as science, religion, law, or literature) with which they have been bound in order to make the case that we understand translation best when we take into account all cultural practices and translation activities cutting synchronically and diachronically through the entire societal fabric.

If the word « culture » comes from the Latin word cultura, the concept itself, which means general knowledge acquired through schools, books and cultural institutions, is related, in the Roman world of the first centuries ad to Greek paideia. As for paideia, which was then restricted to social elite, it covered literary education formulated and conveyed by sophists and grammarians in the time of the Roman Empire, as well as other forms of Greek culture like music, philosophy and sports.

This book focuses on cultural mediators, first of all professors, who are examined from various points of view: social and cultural status, teaching practices or ambivalent representations. Nevertheless, transmission of knowledge exceeds the environment of school; it is performed through literary and intellectual productions, within specialized disciplines, and through reinterpretations which convey a singular world view.

The present collection of essays displays the circulation of culture between the Greek and Roman worlds, throughout an Empire whose epicentre is paideia.

In the study of the ancient world, Babylon can be considered as the most impressive representation, historically, archaeologically, and in literature, of urbanism in the Near East. This first example of an urban centre and its cultural heritage - both tangible and intangible - provides a focal point for discussions of historical and cultural memory in the region. The eleven contributions gathered here draw together multidisciplinary research into Babylonian culture, exploring the epistemic foundations, contacts, resilience, and cultural transmission of the city and its milieu from ancient times up until the modern day. Through this approach, this volume is able to support conversations concerning the historical and cultural memory of Babylon and promote a dialogue that cuts across, and unites, both cultures and academic disciplines.

Ivan Lukačić (born around 1585, died in 1648), composer, Conventual Franciscan, long-time “maestro di cappella” of the cathedral in Split, is a typical “hero” of local historiography. As early as 1935, the Croatian-American musicologist Dragan Plamenac (real name Karl Siebenschein) prepared a selection from the only known collection of Lukačić’s compositions, the Sacrae cantiones (Venice, 1620). In the same year, Plamenac introduced Croatian Renaissance and Baroque music to the local audience for the first time at a concert held at the Croatian Music Institute. In the aftermath of Plamenac’s emigration to the USA in 1939, it took several decades for new archival, stylistic, interdisciplinary, and international research in Croatian musicology to take place. Despite the availability of earlier material as well as contemporary musical publications of Lukačić’s work (J. Andreis, Zagreb, 1970; E. Stipčević, Padua, 1986), it is not an exaggeration to say that Lukačić still remains unknown internationally. For many years, a number of studies of Lukačić and the music of his contemporaries from the “other, eastern coast of the Adriatic” published almost exclusively in Croatian and thus the international professional public had very limited access to them. This collection of studies dedicated to Lukačić and to the musical and cultural contacts between the two Adriatic coasts is the first volume to be published in both English and Italian. The echoes of the contacts between Italy and Croatia reached the Royal Palace in Portugal, shops selling printed music in Denmark and church archives in Slovenia and Poland. The aim of this book is to follow the traces of that cultural dissemination.

The leitmotif of this volume is the concept of “author images”, which is used in modern literary studies to describe processes of production and reading of literary works and is here applied for the first time to the study of ancient works. As a means of analysing ancient literature, it captures the aspect of personification, which is characteristic of ancient author concepts, and at the same time points to the fact that there is a difference between “image” and “author” and that it is only an image and not the author himself that can be seen and grasped by readers.

This makes the “author image” particularly suitable for examining the intersections of material, rhetorical and mental representations of literary authorship that form the subject of this volume. Using selected examples from Latin and Greek literature, the contributors explore the fields of cultural experience that nourish authorial images. They discuss the manifold possibilities of visualising and representing a person’s quality of being an author in general or being an author of specific works, be it physically through artworks or pictures, metaphorically through evoked authorial figures, through thematised representations of authors in a text, or through the combination of authorial images and texts.

These issues are addressed in four overlapping sections, each focusing on different areas of the metaphor’s application, namely material images in the form of artworks, knowledge about persons, textual images as authorial strategies and images in reception.

Comment les Romains parlaient-ils du mariage ? Cette question a été posée à vingt et un spécialistes de littérature latine archaïque, classique, post-classique et tardive dans le but de comparer la rhétorique discursive des Romains à propos d’une institution qui occupe une place de choix dans la société. Ce volume collectif offre des analyses du motif du mariage tel qu’il est traité dans les textes littéraires et juridiques, au prisme de genres variés (comédie, déclamation, élégie, épigramme, genre épistolaire, épopée, historiographie, poésie épidictique, satire, tragédie, textes patristiques, traités philosophiques), mais au-delà de l’épithalame, c’est-à-dire en dehors ou à la frontière de ces discours de circonstance très étudiés depuis vingt ans, tout en tenant compte de leur apport rhétorique, poétique et idéologique. Si le mariage est avant tout pour les Romains un moyen de perpétuer par cette alliance une lignée et d’accroître le corps civique, sa représentation est plurielle. Elle se montre en constante interaction avec le projet littéraire propre à chaque auteur, le genre qui la véhicule, les modèles suivis ou encore le contexte socio-politique, religieux et juridique de l’époque de production du texte. De ces études variées émerge une vision d’ensemble diachronique sur les permanences et évolutions de la pensée et du discours romains à propos de la notion de couple, des relations entre époux, du rôle de la femme, de la place des enfants, de la part de l’eros conjugal et des sentiments dans le mariage.

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.

The myth of Europa, first attested in the eighth century bce in Homeric Poems and Hesiod’s Theogony, shapes new visions, figures and images in European literary productions as well as in artistic circles from Graeco-Roman antiquity to the present day. It is an enigmatic journey whose true beginnings cannot be determined and whose end is probably still far off. The centre of attention in this volume is Europa, Phoenician princess, and not Europe, geopolitical idea. With a multidisciplinary and diachronic view, this book explores different facets of the reception of the myth. The contributors offer reflections on the characterization of the mythical figure of Europa, for the archaic and classical periods, and on the reworking of the myth in the Hellenistic and humanistic period. The investigation extends to the study of the persistence of the myth of Europa in the art and literature of modern and contemporary times.

This volume presents the proceedings of the conference Materiality and Conversion: The Role of Material and Visual Cultures in the Christianization of the Latin West organized by the Centre for Early Medieval Studies in 2020. Its contributions thus focus on the Christianization of the Roman Empire between the fourth and sixth centuries. The studies examine the religious change through the “material turn” approach, building on the material and sensorial dimension of Christian conversion and especially the baptismal rite as one of the key components of the process. The material and visual cultures are regarded as vectors and witnesses of conversion to Christianity, while human body is viewed as one of the agents in ritual actions. The volume covers a wide range of topics, including the prebaptismal purification, the moment of immersion in the baptismal font, the postbaptismal alteration of perception, as well as the continuous changes in funeral forms. As such, the papers attempt to shed more light on the role of materiality in the complex and rapid conversion to Christianity in Late Antique West.

Disagreement, rivalry and dispute are essential to any intellectual development. This holds true for ancient cultures no less than for us today. From the classical period to the Hellenistic age and to Late Antiquity, competition and polemics have shaped the course of intellectual history in Antiquity. Polemical encounters and controversies are often linked to group identities and intellectual networks such as philosophical schools, textual traditions, artistic circles and religious communities. This collection of studies sprang from the ambition to study the interplay between polemics and intellectual networks from a variety of perspectives and disciplines.

The volume gathers fifteen case studies by leading scholars and young researchers alike. They address a wide range of topics, from the Old Academy and the Hellenistic schools to the Neoplatonic commentators of Late Antiquity, from biographical literature to literary criticism, from artistic manuals to scientific treatises, and from pagans to Christians. As multi-sided as the picture that emerges from these case studies may be, they all testify to the fact that implicit and explicit polemics are ubiquitous in ancient Greek and Roman literature and have served as triggers of intellectual progress across times and disciplinary boundaries.

In spite of its importance, Theodore Anagnostes’ Church History has attracted only little scholarly attention so far. To a large extent, we still rely on the assertions of philologists and historians from around the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries, and the authoritative edition of the text is still the one published by C. G. Hansen in 1971, which for the most part remained unchanged in its 1995 reissue. The studies collected in this volume aim to fill this gap in the literature and to answer three main questions: (1) How can Theodore’s working method and the aim of his work be reconstructed? (2) To what extent can the Church History be considered a reliable historical source? And (3) which impact did the work have on contemporary and later historiography? In close connection with the bilingual (Greek-English) edition of the Church History that was recently published, the present volume thus aims to provide a closer and more differentiated appraisal of Theodore Anagnostes and his historiographical project.

The sixteenth century in Europe was a time of profound change, the threshold between the ‘medieval’ and the ‘modern’, as new technologies were introduced, distant lands explored, oceanic trade routes opened, and innovative ideas pursued in fields as varied as politics, science, philosophy, law, and religion. But sweeping transformations also occurred in the rural world, profoundly altering the countryside in both appearance and practices. Crucially for historians, there is abundant documentary evidence for these changes but, while they are less well-documented, their impact can also be traced archaeologically.

This cutting-edge volume is the first to explore the archaeology of the rural world across the ‘long’ sixteenth century and to investigate the changing innovations that were seen in landscape, technology, agriculture, and husbandry during this period. Drawing together contributions from across Europe, and from a range of archaeological disciplines, including zooarchaeology, archaeobotany, landscape archaeology, material culture studies, and technology, this collection of essays sheds new light on a key period of innovation that was a significant precursor to modern economies and societies.

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.