EMISCA

Si l’action du cardinal Hugues de Saint-Cher († 1263) a parfois suscité l’intérêt des historiens, il s’agit ici du premier ouvrage concernant l’œuvre de cet auteur, dont la place est pourtant capitale dans l’évolution de la pensée en Occident chrétien au xiii e siècle. Ce maître dominicain de la deuxième génération assimile le brillant héritage du xii e siècle et prépare l’essor qui va suivre dans le domaine des études bibliques et de la théologie, avec le développement de l’enseignement universitaire. Les différents aspects de son œuvre sont examinés dans ce volume, qui réunit les spécialistes de l’histoire intellectuelle du xiii e siècle. Le commentaire biblique de Hugues, ou Postille, imprimé jusqu’au xviii e siècle, a connu une fortune étonnante; il est, tout comme les concordances et le correctoire biblique diffusés sous son nom, le résultat d’un travail collectif, dirigé par le maître lors de son séjour parisien au couvent de Saint-Jacques. L’œuvre théologique, comportant le premier véritable commentaire des Sentences et de nombreuses quaestiones, aborde les problèmes de fond de la pensée chrétienne comme des aspects plus pratiques. Le point est fait également sur ses sermons, moins connus mais dont le rôle a été important. Ainsi, cet ouvrage, issu d’un colloque international tenu à Paris en mars 2000, apporte-t-il une contribution majeure à l’histoire de la pensée dans la première moitié du xiii e siècle.

Fréquenté par des étudiants venus de tous les pays, recrutant des maîtres eux-mêmes d’origines diverses, le studium de Montpellier s’est imposé dès le xiii e siècle comme l’un des grands centres européens des études médicales, formant des praticiens compétents, assurés, après y avoir conquis leurs grades, d’accomplir des carrières brillantes, du moins pour la plupart d’entre eux, fondées sur le prestige intellectuel, la considération sociale et l’aisance financière.

Dès le xiii e siècle, l’Université de médecine a été dotée de statuts. Elle a pu dès lors développer la formation des futurs praticiens sur des bases institutionnelles solides, attirant vers elle des professeurs renommés, tels Bernard de Gordon, Gérard de Solo, Arnaud de Villeneuve, Guy de Chauliac, Jean de Tournemire.

L’élaboration du savoir médical, outre le recours classique aux auctoritates antiques et arabes, s’est également souciée d’intégrer, à Montpellier, l’apport des disciplines voisines, telles la chirurgie et l’astrologie. Parmi les pathologies, les maladies de l’œil et la lèpre ont fait l’objet d’une attention particulière, tandis que les thérapeutiques, mettant en œuvre notamment les régimes de santé et intégrant la médecine montpelliéraine dans le cadre des pratiques universelles, ont pu harmonieusement combiner l’expérience et la réflexion savante. Forte de sa renommée et du rayonnement de son enseignement, la médecine montpelliéraine a ainsi construit une pensée dont les manuscrits conservés témoignent de la diffusion et illustrent l’influence que Montpellier, en ce domaine comme en d’autres, a exercée en Europe à la fin du Moyen Age.

Scholars of medieval literary and cultural history have grown more aware of the crucial role of memory in the production, reception and functioning of texts and manuscripts. We owe this to the pioneering studies of Frances Yates and, more recently, Mary Carruthers and Susan Hagen.

Historical linguists for their part try to describe the linguistic means by which listeners and readers are enabled to store the information flow in their memories.

The relationship between medieval texts and memory is at the centre of this book. Seven historians of literature, three linguists and one art historian have contributed eleven essays, subsumed under three sections. The first section, ‘Memory Texts’, discusses genres that belong to medieval mnemonics. In the second and most extensive section, ‘Memory Aspects in Texts’, the focus is on literature and, more particularly, on how attention for mnemonics can enhance our insight into the form, composition and functioning of literary texts and manuscripts. Mental and visual images play a central role here. ‘Text Memory’, the final section, analyses medieval (French) literary discourse as a fabric of reference chains, in which different grammatical markers generate and organise mental representations in the memory.

Les précédents colloques des Rencontres médiévales européennes ont renouvelé notre connaissance des origines de l’architecture gothique en mettant en évidence les liens qui existent entre le propos de Suger, tel qu’il a pris corps à Saint-Denis, et les nouveaux courants spirituels du xii e siècle. Les études réunies dans le présent volume prolongent cette enquête. Elles rappellent en particulier le rôle important joué par l’évêque de Paris, Maurice de Sully. Proche des Victorins, attentif aux directives réformatrices de la papauté, il fonde sa pastorale sur un renouveau liturgique dont l’exigence théologique n’est jamais exclue. C’est à lui, par exemple, que l’on doit la pratique de l’ostension de l’hostie. On trouvera ici le portrait de cet évêque exceptionnel ainsi que l’analyse de son grand dessein: la reconstruction de la cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris. Cette entreprise fut accompagnée d’une renaissance artistique perceptible notamment dans le domaine musical. En arrière-plan, on retrouve l’abbaye de Saint-Victor, dont on a tenté d’évaluer l’influence dans la vie spirituelle du temps. L’œuvre de Godefroid, auteur d’un Microcosme, illustre bien ce milieu si original. Notre époque traversée de révolutions et d’incertitudes peut encore tirer des leçons du manifeste que fut en son temps Notre-Dame de Paris.

It is not surprising that the development of the internet and related electronic technologies has coincided with an academic interest in the history of reading. Using and transmitting texts in new ways, scholars have become increasingly aware of the precise ways in which manuscripts and printed books transmitted texts to early modern readers. This volume collects nine essays on reading and literacy in Europe from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Topics include: the function of marginalia in vernacular medieval manuscripts; the trope of reading in the fourteenth century; the definition of literacy in early modern England; marginalia and reading practices in early modern Italy; revision of medieval texts in the Renaissance; the prevalence of translated French poetry in sixteenth-century England; the use of poems as props in the plays of Shakespeare; the private reading of the playscripts of masques; and early-modern women’s reading practices. These essays demonstrate the energy and excitement of the rapidly developing field of the history of reading. They will appeal to those interested in European cultural history, the transition from manuscript to print culture, the history of literacy, and the history of the book.

This volume examines the various forms of contact between Scandinavia and the rest of Europe from 800 to 1350. It consists of twenty-five papers from international scholars specialising in archaeology, onomastics, literature, art history, epigraphy, religious history and linguistics. The volume is innovative in three respects: (i) in transcending conventional historical boundaries, by bringing together work on both the viking and medieval periods; (ii) by examining the ways in which mainland Europe influenced Scandinavia (e.g. kingship, law and social organization; and classical and continental literary traditions); and (iii) by synthesising all the material for an English-language readership for the first time. The broader timespan of investigation illustrates the changing nature of contact and the gradual integration of Scandinavia into European society: by 1350 Scandinavia was no longer a heathen outpost on the periphery of the known world, but an integral part of Western Christendom. The cultural impact of mainland Europe on Scandinavia, frequently mediated through religious channels, although less dramatic, is shown to have had a more significant long-term impact than the earlier viking raids. The volume is structured around the following sections: Historical and Archaeological Evidence for [Scandinavian] Contact with the British Isles; Evidence for the Linguistic Impact of Scandinavian Settlement; Evidence for the Impact of Christianity on Scandinavia; and Textual Evidence for Contact, Conflict, and Coexistence.

The medieval sermon provides the focus for the first volume of Disputatio because it often expresses the concerns of various intellectual milieux, such as the university, Church or court, and attempts to convey those concerns to other parts of medieval society.

Speculum Sermonis is an anthology of essays about medieval sermons in the Christian East and West. It aims to reveal precisely how sermons inform different disciplines (for instance, social and Church history, literature, musicology) and how the methodologies of different disciplines inform sermons. Sermons can, for instance, provide evidence for a reconstruction of medieval liturgy; reciprocally, the field of liturgiology investigates sermons as one aspect of Church performance. The volume’s title image of the mirror and the reference to medieval specula convey the idea of multiple reflections: the sermons’ on culture and the disciplines’ on sermons. Because the contributors to Speculum Sermonis come from a variety of fields, the essays here collectively provide a rich historical and contemporary academic context for reading the medieval sermon.

In addition to essays from across the fields, a number of which establish conclusions transcending disciplinary boundaries, Speculum Sermonis includes an introduction defending interdisciplinary study of sermons and an authoritative bibliography covering both primary and secondary resources for medieval sermons. A unique feature of the volume is the inclusion of response papers to the essays in each of the sections, in the spirit of the book series title Disputatio.

Compared with most of mainland Europe north of the Alps, the introduction of writing in East Central Europe (Bohemia, Poland and Hungary) took place with a considerable delay. Much is known about East Central European uses of writing, although only a fragment of this knowledge is known outside the region. Gathered by historians, palaeographers and codicologists, diplomatists, art historians, literary historians and others, this knowledge has hardly ever been studied in the light of recent discussions on medieval literacy and communication. Work done in the Czech, Polish and Hungarian traditions of scholarship has never been subjected to a comparative analysis. Furthermore, the question of the relation between writing and other forms of communication in the region remains largely unexplored. The volume serves a double purpose. For the first time, a collection of contributions on medieval literacy in East Central Europe is put before the forum of international scholarship. It is also hoped to further discussions of modes of communication, literate behaviour and mentalities among scholars working in the region.

This book aims to collect and present the results of research done within the context of the project ‘The voice of silence / La voz del silencio: An interdisciplinary research project about literate women and women authors in the West-European late Middle Ages from a gender perspective (11th to 15th centuries)’. The project was a bilateral research project, with participants of the University of Chile in Santiago on the one hand and the Universities of Gent and Antwerpen on the other. Medieval scholars, literary historians and literary theorists joined forces. The angle from which the material was being studied, however, was always the same: gender being the central issue. The project focused on women as participants in late medieval society and culture of the Rhineland and the Low Countries. Indeed, all the researchers involved acquired their expertise in this field and/or the field of women’s literacy.

Several members of this Flemish-Chilean project have contributed an essay to this book, but supplemented by guest authors. The guests are internationally renowned scholars reflecting an expertise in gender studies or in an aspect not covered by the team members of the project. Their contributions complete the research results of the project.

The story told in this book is focused on literate women and gender. In the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the voices of women authors, many of them religious and mystics, resounded in a literate society dominated by clerics. Hildegard of Bingen and Hadewijch, two of the most famous representatives of this ‘female voice’ are highlighted in Part I. These women were the forerunners of a new reading culture among (semi-)religious and even lay women in which the use of the vernacular was a decisive factor (Part II). Yet, from the thirteenth century onwards, and with increasing intensity towards the end of the Middle Ages, men once more tried to get a grip on women’s reading and writing. Aspects of these attemps are illustrated in part III.