BOB2023MIOT

Aujourd’hui, l’allaitement est au centre des préoccupations des organismes internationaux, en ce qui concerne les soins destinés aux nouveau-nés et la santé des femmes. Ces questions occupent une place importante dans les débats autour de la maternité et du travail féminin. Mais les pratiques et les représentations de l’allaitement sont traversées par des tensions politiques, économiques et religieuses. Pouvons-nous éclairer les controverses par une mise en perspective historique large de leurs enjeux socio-culturels ? Faire l’histoire de l’allaitement en Europe est une manière de contribuer à une approche globale de la question de la reproduction. Emboîtant le pas aux recherches récentes sur la maternité, les quatre sections de cet ouvrage proposent les résultats d’une vaste enquête collective pluridisciplinaire et ouvrent des pistes pour une réflexion critique sur les enjeux actuels de la parentalité et de la reproduction. Les chapitres de ce volume associent les investigations historiques, anthropologiques et archéologiques à l’histoire de l’art et aux études littéraires. L’ouvrage présente également une riche documentation visuelle et des focus conçus comme outils pour la recherche, la divulgation scientifique et la didactique.

Food determines who we are. We are what we eat, but also how we eat, with whom we eat, where we eat and, in some cases, even why we eat. Food production and consumption in the ancient world can express multiple dimensions of identity and negotiate belonging to, or exclusion from, cultural groups. It can bind through religious praxis, express wealth, manifest cultural identity, reveal differentiation in age or gender, and define status. As a prism through which to investigate the past, its utility is manifold. The chapters gathered together in this ground-breaking book explore the intersections between food, consumption, and ritual within Etruscan society through a purposeful cross-disciplinary approach. It offers a unique and innovative selection of up-to-date analysis from a variety of Etruscan food-related topics. From banqueting, feasting, fish rites, and symbolic consumption to bio-archaeological data, this volume explores a new and exciting field in ancient Italian archaeology.

The Enlightenment has often been used as a fundamental reference point for understanding the evolution of societies. Nevertheless, the broad nature of this term hides great inequalities between different historiographical traditions, with some countries considered to have ‘ownership’ of this intellectual and cultural current, which arose in the eighteenth century, while other lands have been considered at best peripheral, or at worst have been wholly disregarded. This is particularly true of the Ottoman Empire, and of the Balkan states, founded in the first decades of the nineteenth century, which have often been studied only through their relationship with France, Great Britain, and German. This, however, is not sufficient for understanding how these countries entered modernity. The studies gathered in this book seek to question the invention of the National Enlightenment, the history of representations of the European Enlightenment and their variations in Balkan space and time, and the phenomena of acculturation and rejection that can be identified in the histories of these lands in order to offer new insights into the contradictory aspirations of nations that have often been torn between several different models of society.

Pour parler de la foi chrétienne, les Pères ont souvent recouru à des exposés concrets, s’appuyant sur des personnages bibliques. Or, de tous ces modèles bibliques, Jésus est sans conteste le paradigme. Les premiers écrivains chrétiens se sont ainsi attachés à expliquer les épisodes de sa vie pour en dégager des enseignements spirituels, moraux ou doctrinaux, soulevant de la sorte aussi bien des questions d’exégèse que de théologie.

La grande question qui s’est posée dès le début à la communauté chrétienne fut de démontrer que le Jésus de Nazareth de la Bible est bien le « Christ ». Cette question s’est posée de manière complexe et souvent violente au cours des premiers siècles du christianisme.

Partant de la lecture que les Pères ont faite de la figure de Jésus, notamment dans les Évangiles, le présent volume s’interrogera sur l’élaboration progressive, parfois polémique, des différents éléments constitutifs du personnage théologique du Christ. Il s’agira de permettre de mieux saisir la manière dont la figure de Jésus, telle qu’on la trouve dans les Écritures, a été peu à peu comprise et réélaborée dans des lectures théologiques.

Ces réflexions des Pères conservent toute leur portée aujourd’hui, tant les questions soulevées dès les premiers siècles du christianisme continuent d’être actuelles : elles concernent tant les historiens des religions que les théologiens, sans oublier les exégètes et tous ceux qui s’intéressent à la réception du personnage du Christ.

The exemplum held immense power in antiquity, especially in the political field. What role did historical or legendary figures from the Greco-Roman past play during the Empire in speeches intended to build, legitimise or question power? How were they selected? How did they work? These are the questions that the eighteen contributions in this volume seek to answer. This multifaceted approach crosses several literary genres, including poetry, historiography, and political or philosophical discourse, which are examined over six centuries. It considers different types of power or authority (imperial power, but also the authority of the magistrate in the Greek city during Roman domination, and the power of bishops). This highlights the plasticity of exempla that, depending on the context, could justify or question a vast diversity of ideologies and practices of power.

On 25 September 1710, Pope Clement XI finally promulgated the 1704 decree Cum Deus optimus, which condemned the toleration of certain Confucian rituals among Chinese Catholic converts and the use of the Chinese terms tian and Shangdi to refer to the Christian God. This papal decision antagonised the Kangxi Emperor and devastated the Jesuit China mission. Although the Jesuits were prohibited from publicly refuting the decree, the Flemish Jesuit François Noël sought to defend the Jesuit position by publishing his voluminous scholarship on the Chinese classics. Among other works, in 1711 Noël published two seminal contributions to the history of Sinology: the Sinensis imperii libri classici sex or Libri sex, and the Philosophia Sinica, a sophisticated treatment of Chinese metaphysics, ritual, and ethics. While the Libri sex achieved some degree of influence in the Enlightenment through the French translation of the French Jesuit historian Du Halde and the writings of the philosopher Christian Wolff, the Philosophia Sinica was actively suppressed by the Superior-General of the Jesuit order. Yet it is in this latter work where the full breadth of Noël’s originality and intellectual contribution can be found. Noël reinterprets the Jesuits’ position through the lens of Neo-Confucianism, integrating concepts such as li, taiji, yin, and yang in his reading of Chinese philosophy. With contributions from Sinologists and intellectual historians, this book offers the first systematic study of this pioneering work.

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

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

Although much work has been done in the field of Renaissance Studies, at present there is no book which offers a comparative overview of the linguistic interaction between Renaissance Italy and the wider world. The present volume is intended to fill this void, representing the first-ever collection of essays that deal with multiple types of language contact and cross-cultural exchanges in and with respect to Renaissance Italy (1300‒1600). We bring diverse disciplinary perspectives together: literary scholars, historians, and linguists with different regional expertise; we argue for multilingualism and language contact as products of a period of dynamic change which cannot be fully grasped through a single framework. The contributions present a variety of case-studies by often cross-fertilising their approaches with other disciplinary lenses. This book aims to provide a comprehensive picture of a truly global Renaissance Italy where languages, textual traditions, and systems of knowledge from different geographical areas either combined or clashed. It takes a fresh approach to the history of late medieval and early modern Italy by focusing on East/West linguistic and cultural encounters, transmission of ideas and texts, multilingualism in literature (various genres and various forms of multilingualism), translation practices, reception/adaptation of new knowledge, transculturalism and literary exchanges, and the relationship between languages and language varieties.

Ce volume, fruit d’un colloque tenu à Louvain-la-Neuve en mars 2018, est le premier à rassembler des études de chercheurs venu d’horizons historiographiques différents (histoire religieuse, histoire du genre, histoire de l’art, histoire culturelle) pour traiter de l’histoire des masculinités sacerdotales et cléricales du Moyen-Âge à l’époque contemporaine. À l’intersection de l’histoire religieuse et de l’histoire du genre, ces études manifestent l’importance de la prise en compte de l’outil du genre pour l’histoire des clergés, mais mettent ausssi en lumière la manière dont tant les approches historiques que la prise en compte du religieux, interrogent en retour les catégories par lesquelles les études de genre ont interrogé les masculinités contemporaines.

The funerary art that was produced in Roman Palmyra, a caravan city in the Syrian steppe desert, is rightly world-renowned. The frontal depictions of the deceased, featured in torso-length portraits, and the large-scale banqueting scenes are iconic, and lent an added mystique by the absence of any literary sources that might aid in their interpretation. But while from a distance these exquisite portraits might seem rather formulaic, when examining more closely, it is clear that these scenes reveal a surprisingly rich and varied funerary décor. Alongside the more popular iconographic choices are singular scenes, motifs, and elements that deviate from the norm, while new patterns and connections between Palmyra and its surroundings are identifiable.

This volume, which draws on the vast materials gathered under the auspices of the Palmyra Portrait Project directed by Professor Rubina Raja, explores the ‘oddities’ raised by the Palmyrene corpus; it examines one-off scenes or elements, and unusual or unparalleled iconographical choices, and questions how and why such unusual choices should be interpreted. The chapters gathered here not only focus on these visual ‘hapax legomena’ in Palmyra, but also explore the city’s connections with the art of Roman centres to the west, as well as the nearby Hellenistic city states, regional centres of production, and Parthian and Persian sites to the east. Through this approach, the authors engage with the visual richness and sheer amount of choice that existed in Palmyrene funerary art, while also providing unique insights into the knowledge culture that existed within Palmyrene society.