BOB2023MIOT

Claude Langlois est l’auteur d’une œuvre considérable par son ampleur, sa diversité et son inventivité, qui fait sans nul doute de lui l’un des très grands historiens de sa génération. Il fut directeur d’études à l’EPHE de 1993 à 2005, président de la section des sciences religieuses entre 1995 et 2002, co-fondateur avec Régis Debray, en 2002, de l’IESR, dont il fut le directeur de 2002 à 2005. Il n’a cessé - du Catholicisme au féminin (1984) à la suite sur Thérèse de Lisieux, en passant par L’Encyclopédie théologique de Migne (1992), Le crime d’Onan (2005) et nombre de ses articles - de questionner le statut de l’histoire religieuse au regard d’une histoire sociale, d’une histoire culturelle, d’une histoire du genre ; il a fait de la production du discours théologique un observatoire aigu du changement religieux.

Où en est aujourd’hui le débat sur les manières d’historiciser la théologie ? Quel parti tirer des voies pionnières ouvertes par Claude Langlois ? Les auteurs de ce volume - historiens, sociologues, théologiens et spécialistes de littérature - explorent ces questions et donnent à voir, à travers la pluralité de leurs contributions, un paysage de recherche nourri d’intelligence complice.

Cet ouvrage est le témoignage de leur reconnaissance envers un historien et un professeur qui n’a cessé d’ouvrir des chantiers nouveaux et d’arpenter des terrains en friche, livrant sa propre recherche aux surprises de l’archive et à ses détours imprévus, sans jamais renoncer au dialogue avec celles et ceux pour lesquels son œuvre continue d’être une précieuse source de réflexion.

This book questions the place of Armenian visual and material culture in the period known as Late Antiquity, at a time when Armenia is usually presented as an in-between space defined by surrounding external entities: the Roman and the Persian, and later Arab world. The volume includes articles that confront this notion both from the perspective of art history, architecture, and archaeology, and from a historiographical point of view, which examines the reception of Armenian arts by scholars from Italy, Russia, and France. The articles in this richly illustrated volume aim to reposition Armenia as one of the forces of artistic creation and mediation to be reckoned with within the Mediterranean and Eurasian space of Late Antiquity. This project draws on the papers presented at the conference “Re-Constructing Late Antique Armenia (2nd–8th Centuries CE). Historiography, Material Culture, Immaterial Heritage” that took place in February 2022 at the Center for Early Medieval Studies in Brno, Czech Republic.

This book collates 100 exhibits with accompanying essays as an imaginary museum dedicated to the musical cultures of Renaissance Europe, at home and in its global horizons. It is a history through artefacts-materials, tools, instruments, art objects, images, texts, and spaces-and their witness to the priorities and activities of people in the past as they addressed their world through music. The result is a history by collage, revealing overlapping musical practices and meanings-not only those of the elite, but reflecting the everyday cacophony of a diverse culture and its musics. Through the lens of its exhibits, this museum surveys music’s central role in culture and lived experience in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, offering interest and insights well beyond the strictly musicological field.

Ancient commentaries on poetry - due to their heteronomous nature, their miscellaneous character, and the fact that most of them are transmitted in abridged and anonymous form - are usually not considered ‘authorial’ texts in the same way as poems or literary prose are. On the other hand, as didactic texts, they rely on authority to convey their interpretation, and they also often seem to have been perceived as products of authorial activity, as paratexts, references and pseudepigraphic attributions demonstrate.

The aim of this volume is to explore this tension and to examine commentaries and scholia on poetry in terms of authorship and ‘authoriality’. The contributions use several Latin and Greek corpora as case studies to shed light on how these texts were read, how they display authorial activity themselves, and how they fulfil their function as didactic works. They provide reflections on the relationship of author, authorship, and authority in ‘authorless’ traditions, explore how authorial figures and authorial viewpoints emerge in an implicit manner in spite of the stratified nature of commentaries, investigate the authorial roles adopted by commentators, compilers and scribes, and elucidate how commentators came to be perceived as authors in other exegetic traditions.

This book explores the aesthetic consequences of Protestantism in Scandinavia. Fourteen case studies from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century discuss five abstract and trans-historical principles that characterize Scandinavian aesthetics and that arguably derive from Protestant thinking and practice, namely: simplicity, logocentrism, tension between pronounced individualism and collectivism, relatedness to the world, and ethics. The contributions address the peculiar aesthetics of Scandinavian print, literature, architecture, film, and opera and reflect on the influence of Protestant traditions on the establishment of genres and writing practices. This volume is the first in a new series that will focus on the aesthetics of Protestantism in Scandinavia, both theoretically and through exemplary individual analyses.

This volume analyses how and why members of scholarly societies such as the Royal Society, the Society of Antiquaries of London, and the Leopoldina collected specimens of the natural world, art, and archaeology in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These scholarly societies, founded before knowledge became subspecialised, had many common members. We focus upon how their exploration of natural philosophy, antiquarianism, and medicine were reflected in collecting practice, the organisation of specimens and how knowledge was classified and disseminated. The overall shift from curiosity cabinets with objects playfully crossing the domains of art and nature, to their well-ordered Enlightenment museums is well known. Collective Wisdom analyses the process through which this transformation occurred, and the role of members of these academies in developing new techniques of classifying and organising objects and new uses of these objects for experimental and pedagogical purposes.

Ancient philosophy is known for its organisation into distinct schools. But those schools were not locked into static dogmatism. As recent scholarship has shown, lively debate persisted between and within traditions. Yet the interplay between tradition and disagreement remains underexplored. This volume asks, first, how philosophers talked about differences of opinion within and between traditions and, second, how such debates affected the traditions involved. It covers the period from the first century BCE, which witnessed a turn to authoritative texts in different philosophical movements, through the rise of Christianity, to the golden age of Neoplatonic commentaries in the fifth and sixth centuries CE.

By studying various philosophical and Christian traditions alongside and in interaction with each other, this volume reveals common philosophical strategies of identification and differentiation. Ancient authors construct their own traditions in their (polemical) engagements with dissenters and opponents. Yet this very process of dissociation helped establish a common conceptual ground between traditions. This volume will be an important resource for specialists in late ancient philosophy, early Christianity, and the history of ideas.

The closure of religious houses, in varying circumstances, affected all of Europe at some point between the sixteenth and nineteenth century. At different times and in different countries the consequences were widely varied, in some cases preserving medieval and early modern collections intact, in others abandoning books to their fate, or transferring them piecemeal into new ownership to serve different cultural purposes. Integral preservation or dispersal may each be viewed in positive or negative terms. For religious and political history there are many, and bigger, factors involved, and the effects of secularization worked on many things beside libraries and books. None the less, by focusing on books and libraries through these changes a particular narrative emerges of great cultural importance. It is the most important book-historical story for the survival and accessibility of Europe's heritage of the written word, one that interacts with major historical themes and still connects with future issues for the continuing role of books and libraries in the European heritage.

A conference held in Oxford in 2012 brought together thirty experts in different aspects of this process or with knowledge of its impact in different countries and at different periods. The result was to bring together and share for the first time the similar and different experiences of different European countries, from Portugal and Spain in the west to Poland and Ukraine in the east, from Finland and Sweden in the north to Naples in the south, with ramifications stretching to North and South America. While reading this volume of collected essays, the reader may notice a disparity in the evidence that each author has been able to bring to bear upon their subject. Provenance research is well advanced in some territories, less so in others. In the decade since the conference and this publication, there have been some attempts to bridge certain gaps. But in general, there has been little new work in the years since the conference took place. The editors anticipate that this publication will stimulate further research, bridging some of the gaps visible in the evidence presented in this volume. Multiple avenues for further investigation open up, indeed, in historical and cultural studies, such as the impact of the secularization on nonreligious libraries, and the change in attitude with respect to certain disciplines and even to erudition itself.

Les fouilles franco-yougoslaves dirigées conjointement par Noël Duval (1929-2018) et Vladislav Popovic (1930-1999), d’abord à Sirmium de 1973 à 1978, puis à Caricin Grad de 1978 à 1991, demeurent encore aujourd’hui un modèle de collaboration archéologique internationale. Du fait de leur impressionnant bilan, les deux missions participèrent pleinement à la mise en valeur du patrimoine romain sur le territoire de l’actuelle Serbie, de même qu’à la démonstration de l’intérêt de la période que l’on qualifie aujourd’hui d’Antiquité tardive. Dédié à la mémoire des deux grandes figures susmentionnées, le présent ouvrage unit les découvertes restées inédites de l’exploration franco-yougoslave de la basilique Saint-Irénée de Sirmium, menée entre 1976 et 1977, avec celles faites plus récemment, soit en 2002 et en 2016, à l’occasion des travaux conduits sur le site de la nécropole environnante de cette église paléochrétienne, par l’équipe de l’Institut archéologique de Belgrade. Les résultats obtenus par de véritables « pères fondateurs » se retrouvent donc ici associés à ceux de générations qui ont été formées dans la suite directe des importantes avancées scientiques, non seulement en termes de données, mais aussi de méthodologie, dont ils furent à l’origine.

The relationship of Orthodox Christianity to the modern sciences has received scant attention in the last fifty years. While important contributions have been made in history, theology and philosophy, there have been very few attempts to highlight the importance and fruitfulness of the field for an international audience. This volume brings together contributions from scholars of different disciplines to discuss the past, present and future of the relations between Orthodox Christianity and the sciences. The topics covered range from theological discussions of miracles to the importance of seminary work on science and religion and from a practitioner’s view of addressing medical suffering to a historical discussion of the Scientific Revolution in Orthodox spaces. The volume is addressed to historians, philosophers, theologians, scientists and members of the clergy, but also to any scholar that is interested in discovering the vibrancy of the emerging field of Science and Orthodox Christianity Studies.