EMISCA

Historien de la philosophie et de la théologie du Moyen Âge tardif, spécialiste des xiv e et xv e siècles, Zénon Kaluza a profondément marqué les études médiévales des dernières décennies. Ses travaux portent sur plusieurs grands thèmes de l’histoire doctrinale du Moyen Âge, notamment le «platonisme» parisien et pragois, les méthodes et les langages de la philosophie et de la théologie, les contextes institutionnels du savoir et, enfin, la question du rapport entre l’Église et l’État. Pour rendre hommage à l’homme et à son œuvre, ses collègues et amis lui offrent ce recueil d’articles. Réunies sous le titre de Chemins de la pensée médiévale, ces études explorent différents aspects de l’histoire de la philosophie et de la théologie ainsi que, dans une perspective plus large, de l’histoire intellectuelle et sociale du Moyen Âge. Par l’ampleur de son orientation thématique, le présent volume offre une excellente présentation de l’état actuel de la recherche sur la pensée médiévale.

Fear is a topic that appeals to a wide audience and is particularly of interest today. In the modern world, we fear war and terrorism, economic recession, and environmental degradation: these fears make up a great portion of the fabric of our daily lives. This is a volume of essays on fear and its representations in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In it, the authors raise and try to answer questions about the ways in which individuals, families, and nations five-hundred, one-thousand, or even fifteen-hundred years ago approached the idea of fear.

The interdisciplinary nature of this volume and its editors (an historian of late antiquity and professor of literature of the Middle Ages) motivates an analysis of fear from a multitude of perspectives and within a host of secular and religious literature, historical treatises, scholastic works, art, and political accounts. The volume covers several main topics: Defining the Nature of Fear; Fear and Religion; Fear in Politics and Cultural Identity; Fear as a Literary and Dramatic Device; The Fears of Courtly Lovers, Knights, and Poets; Fear and the Mystic.

Through its breadth, depth, and interdisciplinary focus, the present volume makes a full contribution to the study of fear in medieval and Renaissance culture for historians, art historians, students of language and philosophy and anyone interested in how people in the past have experienced fear.

The practice of commentary upon authoritative texts is a prominent and fundamental feature of all teaching and learning during the Middle Ages. The roots of medieval commentaries made upon important philosophical texts lay in antiquity, but commentaries upon such texts — both ancient and more recent — flourished as never before during the late Middle Ages. Subsequently, beyond the end of the Middle Ages, the appeal and the habit of commentary declined, and to the point that today a considerable effort is required to understand medieval commentaries — their genres, their techniques, their evolution, their extraordinary persistence in use over many centuries — and perhaps too to understand the much diminished importance of the practice of commentary on select texts in current academic scholarship. The Philosophical Commentary in the Latin West (XIII-XV Centuries) proved to be a rich, varied and seemingly inexhaustible theme for the Colloquium of the International Society for the Study of Medieval Philosophy. The contributors who were invited discussed commentaries on texts of medicine, alchemy, biology, psychology, physics, ethics and politics as well as theology. The medieval commentators themselves were Arabs and Jews as well as Christians.

Depuis plus d’un demi-siècle, les historiens et les sociologues se sont beaucoup intéressés aux courants de pensée et aux mouvements qui, au cours des siècles, ont lié l’aspiration à un ordre social plus juste ou à une réforme religieuse à l’avènement d’une ère nouvelle, placée sous le signe de la perfection et de la paix, qui durerait jusqu’à la fin des temps. On a longtemps considéré ces phénomènes comme des formes de fanatisme ou comme une expression “pré-politique” de la lutte des classes. Sans négliger ces facteurs, le présent volume vise à fournir une interprétation équilibrée et à jour de ces formes radicales d’attente et d’espoir d’un changement, qui n’ont rien perdu de leur actualité.

Le présent Colloque, organisé par les Rencontres médiévales européennes, tend d’abord, ici comme dans d’autres recherches analogues qui ont déjà intéressé la même association, à mettre en lumière, par une démarche pluridisciplinaire, certains aspects de la culture médiévale qui manifestent à la fois sa complexité, sa profondeur et sa beauté. Il s’agit ici de la parole et de la beauté où s’accordent et s’unissent l’art littéraire et la sagesse, philosophique et même théologique.

Il est en effet possible de répondre aujourd’hui à certaines objections qui s’adressent communément au Moyen Âge lui-même et plus largement aux formes d’expression qu’il met en lumière. On lui reproche à la fois d’avoir abusé de la rhétorique et de l’avoir méconnue. Mais les chercheurs savent depuis quelques années que la rhétorique ne se réduit ni à l’abstraction scolastique ni à la sophistique. Dans la forme qu’elle prend jusqu’au xiv e siècle, en se référant à l’Antiquité et en préparant plus qu’on ne croit la Renaissance, elle suscite et reconnaît le progrès du langage, de sa justesse et de ses grâces. Pour cela, elle s’appuie à la fois sur la beauté de l’idéal et sur la rigueur de la pensée, sur la transcendance platonicienne et sur le bon-sens aristotélicien combiné avec l’étendue du savoir. Elle s’accorde aussi avec la poétique, latine ou profane, simplement lyrique, ou tournée vers la liturgie. Nous savons encore aujourd’hui que l’usage positif de l’intelligence peut s’associer avec la naïveté mystique dans un divino-humanisme.

Nous avons voulu montrer dans la tradition qui mène jusqu’à la modernité cette présence constante du coeur: dans la parole la plus fine chacun peut trouver l’amour le plus pur.

Amnon Linder, professor of medieval history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has published seminal studies in the history of the Christian Holy Land and in Jewish-Christian relations in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. In recent years he has dedicated himself to the study of medieval liturgy, particularly Crusader liturgy of the liberation and destruction of Jerusalem (forthcoming as the next volume in this series).

The essays gathered here from friends, colleagues and students of Prof. Linder pick up the themes of his publications — medieval law, liturgy and literature. The papers deal with a variety of sources, encompass the fourth to fifteenth centuries, and span from the Holy Land to the British Isles.

Le moyen âge latin fut par définition une période de traduction. Soucieux d’avoir à leur disposition les textes d’autres cultures, les médiévaux n’ont eu de cesse de transférer d’une langue à l’autre les œuvres de l’Antiquité classique ainsi que l’héritage arabe et hébreu avec les moyens dont ils disposaient à leur époque.

Afin d’avoir une meilleure connaissance de leurs méthodes de travail et des problèmes inhérents au passage d’une langue à l’autre, il est important de retrouver les manuscrits qui ont servi de base de travail aux traducteurs. On y trouve des notes de leur main qui expliquent les difficultés rencontrées, les hésitations dans l’utilisation d’un terme plutôt qu’un autre pour rendre en latin un vocable de la langue source ainsi que des notes marginales qui sont autant de remarques philologiques, matériel de première main pour notre compréhension et notre connaissance des niveaux linguistiques tant des traducteurs que des utilisateurs depuis l’Antiquité jusqu’à la Renaissance.

D’autre part, lorsqu’elles existent, les préfaces laissées par les traducteurs en tête de leur travail constituent des documents de première importance pour notre compréhension de leurs problèmes et pour la reconstitution de la méthode utilisée pour les résoudre.

On trouvera dans ce volume beaucoup de matériel encore inédit. Les recherches menées sur les manuscrits ont permis de voir plus clair dans la problématique propre aux traductions faites tant sur le grec, l’arabe, le syriaque, l’hébreu qu’en langues vulgaires. Les exposés sont dus à des spécialistes des divers domaines concernés.

The phrase ‘cultural materialism’, names an approach to cultural analysis that interrogates the socio-economic conditions within which artefacts are produced as well as their participation in other ideological and material fields of culture. Disciplines that have traditionally studied cultural artefacts like literature and painting have increasingly focused on the material production and ideological operation of objects once thought of in idealized or purely aesthetic terms. By the same token, historians - whose work, of necessity, has always tended to deal with the material traces of culture - have increasingly been willing to consider the social and ideological importance of art. The increasing popularity of this cultural studies approach to the past has in turn spurred investigation into other kinds of materiality. Recent historical and literary scholarship, for example, has become increasingly aware of the ways in which the lived materiality of the human body informs a range of cultural discources.

The fifteenth century was of crucial importance for the Low Countries. After centuries of gradual political disintegration, a rapid unification took place during the reign of the Burgundian dukes, Philip the Good and Charles the Bold. How did this new ‘state’ work? To most people the political high-points are well known; but the slow process of integration that had by then started remains, by contrast, largely unknown. In this process, the regional institutions, which were thoroughly modernised by the Burgundian dukes, seem to have played a key role. The first part of this volume discusses the role of these regional institutions. In particular it studies the role in the principalities of Brabant, Holland and Flanders of civil servants as formal and informal ‘powerbrokers’ between central government and subjects in the Low Countries during the Burgundian period.

The Low Countries, however, cannot be treated in isolation from its neighbours: they were situated literally on the frontier of the Holy Roman Empire and France and there were intensive commercial and political contacts with England. Therefore, by way of comparison, the second part of this volume contrasts developments in other European countries, in particular, France, the Empire and England.

The articles in this volume are written by a group of distinguished specialists in the field of administrative history, working at universities in Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

The anniversary of Augustine’s arrival in Kent in 597, and the subsequent christianization of England, made conversion an obvious theme for the 1997 International Medieval Congress. It was also a theme which attracted massive interest, and not just from early medievalists interested in the christianization of England and its near-contemporary parallels. This volume presents reworkings of 28 of these contributions.

The Early Middle Ages are represented in a number of papers concerned with Central and Eastern Europe and as far east as Georgia. Interest in the Baltic region took this aspect of the christianization of Europe well into the fourteenth century. Papers on these regions constitute a good proportion of the present volume, and they provide a very useful point of entry into work currently being done on christinization in areas which are less well known to most historians than is Western Europe not least because of the range of languages involved.

With respect to later periods of the Middle Ages two issues predominated: one was the interface between Christians and Muslims in Spain and in the Holy Land and also between Christians and Jews once again in Spain, but also in England, and more generally in Western Europe. The other was the rather more theological question of the nature of conversion, as discussed by Aquinas, and in Franciscan writings. This wide-ranging volume concentrates on historical approaches to the topic. The different types of questions posed and materials used are a fascinating indication of the different interpretations to be found among specialists in different fields.

Christianization, as a process affecting complete peoples, or at least large groups, attracts attention, as does conversion of the individual. By putting these varying approaches together, this collection indicates the range of current work on christianization and conversion history and the range itself, quite apart from the individual studies, is an eye-opener.