EMISCA

L’encyclopédisme médiéval a fait l’objet de divers colloques ces dernières années, apportant des éclairages complémentaires. Un biais peu exploré encore est celui des relations entre œuvres encyclopédiques orientales et occidentales.

Le colloque de Louvain-la-Neuve «Une lumière venue d’ailleurs» s’est donné pour objectif général de mettre en parallèle les deux traditions, sur base d’études philologiques et historiques. Les onze articles publiés abordent les traditions arabe (C. Baffioni, G. de Callataÿ), persane (Ž. Vesel), juive (M. Zonta), la réception d’auteurs arabes par le Moyen Age latin (A. Galonnier, M.-C. Duchenne et M. Paulmier), la diffusion des textes latins (J. Loncke, B. Van den Abeele) et les avatars tardifs de l’encyclopédisme en Occident (C. Boucher, B. Roling, I. Ventura). Par le croisement de ces éclairages, le volume souhaite faire mieux comprendre les influences que l’Occident chrétien, l’Islam et le monde hébraïque exercèrent réciproquement à cette époque-charnière de leur histoire.

This interdisciplinary study takes as its subject the multi-faceted genre of didactic literature (the literature of instruction) which constituted the cornerstone of literary enterprise and social control in medieval and early-modern Europe. Following an introduction that raises questions of didactic meaning, intent, audience, and social effect, nineteen chapters deal with the construction of the individual didactic voice and persona in the premodern period, didactic literature for children, women as the creators, objects, and consumers of didactic literature, the influence of advice literature on adult literacy, piety, and heresy, and the revision of classical didactic forms and motifs in the early-modern period. Attention is paid throughout to the continuities of didactic literature across the medieval and early-modern periods — its intertextuality, reliance on tradition, and self-renewal — and to questions of gender, authority, control, and the socially constructed nature of advice. Contributors particularly explore the intersection of advice literature with real lives, considering the social impact of both individual texts and the didactic genre as a whole. The volume deals with a wide variety of texts from the early Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, written in languages from Latin through the European vernaculars to Byzantine Greek and Russian, offering a comprehensive overview of this pervasive and influential genre.

This volume surveys recent studies of the metaphorical and material facets of food in medieval and early modern Europe. Ranging from literary, historical, and political analyses to archaeological and botanical ones, this collection explores food as a nexus of pre-modern European culture. Food and feasting are understood not simply as the consumption of material goods but also as the figurative and symbolic representations of culture. To understand the myriad ways in which discourses about food and feasting are mobilized during this period is to better understand the fundamental role food and feasting played in the development of Europeans’ habitual patterns of behavior and of thought.

The meanings of the noun ‘creation’, and the verb ‘to create’, range from the traditional theological idea of God creating ex nihilo to a more recent sense of the process of artistic conception. This collection of thirteen essays, written by scholars of music, literature, the visual arts, and theology, explores the complicated relationship between medieval rituals and theology, and the development of an idea of human artistic creation, which came to the fore in the sixteenth century.

The volume concentrates on the period from the Carolingians to the Counter-Reformation but also includes some twentieth-century musicians. Each essay is dedicated to a particular topic concerned with ritual or artistic beginnings, inventions, harmony and disharmony, as well as representations or celebrations of creation. Central themes include the interplay of the ideas of God as creator, of God acting and recreating in medieval liturgy, of God as artist—the deus artifex of the Pythagorean cosmology, which was occasionally referred to as recently as the early nineteenth century—and, finally, of the homo creator, a concept in which man reflected (and eventually replaced) God in his artistic creativity.

This book therefore features new, significant, individual contributions from a range of scholarly disciplines, but, taken as a whole, it also constitutes a complex interdisciplinary study, with large-scale historical constructions.

Palimpsests are texts from which the primary text has been effaced to make room for fresh writing. The practice was particularly important in the early Middle Ages, when numerous, often precious, books were subjected to this treatment. As a result, many ancient texts lay hidden in European libraries for centuries.

Ever since the first palimpsests were discovered in the seventeenth century, scholars have been fascinated by the possibility of discovering hitherto unknown texts. For a long time, the lower script of palimpsests could only be brought back to the light of day through the use of chemical reagents that proved very detrimental to the manuscripts. The great advance away from these destructive techniques came at the beginning of the twentieth century with the application of ultra-violet photography. Today, striking advances in this field are again being made with the development of digital imaging.

The contributions in this volume focus mainly on the cultural evidence offered by palimpsests from the early Middle Ages. Some contributors have examined particular manuscripts in great detail (the London palimpsest of Jerome’s Chronicle or the Munich palimpsest codex from Benediktbeuern); others have looked at specific types of texts that have suffered deletion in this way (liturgical palimpsests, Carolingian letters). The volume also contains a handlist of all known palimpsested manuscripts in Beneventan script.

The medieval English West Midlands has long been associated with the production of vernacular texts, in Old and Middle English, and with the making of several famous manuscripts. The aim of this volume is to re-think assumptions about medieval literature and the region in the light of new research in medieval book history. A series of specially commissioned essays in ‘manuscript geography’ examines the making and use of texts and books in relation to cultural networks in the region and beyond. Included are case studies of manuscripts of Worcester and the Worcester diocese from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries; investigations of manuscript production in fourteenth-century Shropshire and its wider regional links; and essays on textual cultures in Warwickshire from the activities of the aristocrats and gentry of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the projects of later antiquarians. Essays in the final section of the volume reflect on the possibilities of large-scale, corpus-based research on medieval manuscript books. Collectively the essays identify and explore some of the investments of traditional regionalist accounts of vernacular literary culture and model new theoretical and methodological approaches.

The essays collected in this volume focus on a prominent aspect of Anglo-Saxon culture: educational texts and the Insular manuscripts which have preserved them.

The English imported manuscripts and texts from the Continent, whilst a series of foreign masters, from Theodore of Tarsus to Abbo of Fleury, brought with them knowledge of works which were being studied in Continental schools. Although monastic education played a leading role for the entire Anglo-Saxon period, it was in the second half of the tenth and early eleventh centuries that it reached its zenith, with its renewed importance and the presence of energetic masters such as Æthelwold and Ælfric. The indebtedness to Continental programs of study is evident at each step, beginning with the Disticha Catonis. Nevertheless, a number of texts initially designed for a Latin-speaking milieu appear to have been abandoned (for instance in the field of grammar) in favour of new teaching tools.

Beside texts which were part of the standard curriculum, Anglo-Saxon manuscripts provide abundant evidence of other learning and teaching instruments, in particular those for a specialized class of laymen, the Old English læce, the healer or physician. Medicine occupies a relevant place in the book production of late Anglo-Saxon England and, in this field too, knowledge from very far afield was preserved and reshaped.

All these essays, many by leading scholars in the various fields, explore these issues by analysing the actual manuscripts, their layout and contents. They show how miscellaneous collections of treatises in medieval codices had an internal logic, and highlight how crucial manuscripts are to the study of medieval culture.

La Sainte-Chapelle est un chef-d’œuvre hors du commun, l’un des monuments du XIIIe siècle les plus appréciés du grand public. Emblème du gothique à son apogée, elle est aussi une œuvre majeure dont on connaît exceptionnellement bien le contexte historique et politique de sa création et la personnalité de ses commanditaires, le roi Louis IX et sa mère, Blanche de Castille. Négligée par les historiens de l’art dès les années 60 du siècle dernier, elle connaît heureusement un regain d’intérêt depuis quelques années.

Ce volume rassemble les communications d’un colloque international réuni pour faire la synthèse des acquis les plus récents concernant cet exceptionnel monument. Les contributeurs y traitent de divers aspects de la Sainte-Chapelle: restaurations, architecture, décor sculpté, vitraux, fonction, signification et mise en scène des reliques, liturgie et héraldique, personnalité et préoccupations artistiques, politiques et religieuses du commanditaire royal, à la veille de son départ pour la croisade. Il en résulte une image fascinante et très complète de ce chef-d’œuvre unique qu’est la chapelle palatine de saint Louis.

This volume presents twenty essays by leading scholars of Old Norse which bring into focus the nature of learned traditions — both oral and written — in medieval Scandinavia and the interpretation and re-interpretation of them over time. Theoretical frameworks for understanding Old Norse literature is the initial topic of the collection, which then moves on to present recent work on Old Norse myth and society; current perspectives on oral traditions in performance and text; and reflections on medieval ideas about language, both vernacular and Latin. The collection is rounded off by a section on prolonged traditions — the transformation of local and imported traditions into new literary forms. Individual essays in the volume offer significant primary research as well as reconsiderations of key issues in scholarship, their subjects ranging widely, both conceptually and chronologically, around the twin themes of learning and understanding. Like the research of the volume’s honorand, Margaret Clunies Ross, Learning and Understanding in the Old Norse World exemplifies the diversity and vigour of current research in the field of Old Norse and draws together philological, literary, historical and anthropological perspectives on the subject.