EMISCS15

Les actes du colloque « Compétition et sacré au haut Moyen Âge : entre médiation et exclusion » constituent le deuxième volume de la série de publications du groupe international de recherches sur la compétition dans les sociétés médiévales (400-1100). Ce programme de recherche considère les objets de la compétition, les moyens et les formes de la compétition qui dépendent des capacités de régulation de cette même compétition : règles du jeu édictées par les autorités, mécanismes de médiation plus ou moins forts, équilibre de la terreur, la performativité des moyens : résultats en termes d’objets et d’enjeux, les possibilités de mobilité sociale, de changement de statut ou de position qui sont plus ou moins grandes selon les périodes et les espaces. La rencontre de Limoges place le sacré au centre de la réfl exion sur la compétition, mais il est nécessaire de ne pas restreindre le sacré à ce qui est consacré par l’autorité ecclésiastique. Si le sacré est bien ce qui est doté d’une force surnaturelle et qui isole, la distinction sacré-profane ne passe pas complètement par l’opposition clercs-laïcs. Avec le sacré on touche au pouvoir, puisqu’il ne peut y avoir de pouvoir légitime au Moyen Âge sans lien avec le sacré, quelle que soit la forme prise par la relation. Même si les clercs tendent à monopoliser de plus en plus le sacré par le biais du « consacré », la spécifi cité de la période prégrégorienne tient précisément à ce que le sacré n’est pas encore entièrement contrôlé par les clercs et qu’il est donc objet de compétition. En même temps, le sacré est un instrument de la compétition et il est facteur d’exclusion.

La traduction « intralinguale », du « même au même », selon la définition qu’en a donnée Michel Zink, est une invention de ces mêmes clercs médiévaux qui ont mis en communication à travers la translatio studii deux horizons culturels et linguistiques. Cette traduction constitue la trace la plus manifeste de l’évolution d’un idiome au sein du diasystème linguistique gallo-roman. Or d’un état à l’autre de la langue française, et contrairement à ce que l’on pourrait croire, ce transfert ne vas pas de soi. D’un côté il continue de témoigner d’une conscience de la différence, de l’autre, à la différence de ce que l’on constate au Moyen Âge, d’une indifférence traductologique affichée des translateurs de notre temps à l’égard de leur acte, des principes qui le fondent comme des choix techniques qui l’expriment. Ce livre met en lumière nombre des arguments qui peuvent expliquer ce silence des traducteurs modernes. Beaucoup d’entre eux ne voient-ils pas dans leur travail un simple moyen de rendre accessible de la manière la plus neutre possible un texte vieilli destiné à un lecteur non spécialiste ? La revendication stéréotypée de la fidélité respectueuse au texte source conduit alors bien des traductions actuelles à décalquer la langue d’origine dans un français artificiel qu’Antoine Berman nommait le « clerquois ».

Les différents travaux rassemblés dans le présent volume suivent quatre perspectives critiques : Théories et méthodologies, Pratiques poétiques, Traductions romanes, Seuils et impasses. Ils abordent différentes facettes de ces questions jusqu’ici inexplorées et présentent des solutions méthodologiques et pragmatiques qui permettront sans doute de dépasser les peurs françaises de la traduction intralinguale.

Claudio Galderisi est professeur de langues et littératures de la France médiévale à l’Université de Poitiers (CESCM). Il a dirigé les trois volumes des Translations médiévales. Cinq siècles de traductions en français au Moyen Âge. XIe-XVe s. (Brepols, 2011).

Jean-Jacques Vincensini est professeur de langue et littératures médiévales à l’Université de Tours (CESR). Il a édité et traduit notamment le Roman de Mélusine de Jean d’Arras et de Coudrette. Il prépare l’édition et la traduction de l’Escoufle de Jean Renart.

The way and extent to which differences in economic systems and stages of development, and the impact of institutional changes affected the political economy and fiscal systems of regions, or vice versa, is the overall theme of this volume. One major problem is the non-convergence of economic regions, financial networks, political borders and fiscal systems. The question is whether a set of variables is supra-regional, interregional, regional, local or even a mix of all of these. These questions have broad implications for our understanding of urban society and the relations between town and countryside. This volume contains studies about economic, financial and political structures, and developments in different regions of the Low Countries and the Lower Rhine area in a regional comparative perspective during the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period.

L’excommunication et l’anathème, « condamnation à la mort éternelle », théoriquement plus grave mais en réalité devenu rapidement synonyme, sont attestés dès les débuts du christianisme et suivent d’abord une évolution parallèle à celle de la pénitence : ils deviennent progressivement de moins en moins publics et de plus en plus renouvelables, devenant par là-même des instruments privilégiés du contrôle social par la pression exercée sur l’individu retranché de la communauté chrétienne.

Cet ouvrage s’interroge à la fois sur la législation ecclésiastique dans la longue durée - pour quelle faute encourt-on l’excommunication entre le IVe et le Xe siècle ? - et sur la pertinence de son application suivant les différents espaces, afin d’évaluer les modalités de la mise en place de cette norme canonique. Il permet de comprendre comment l’excommunication sert à définir et à délimiter les communautés et il étudie les formules et les rituels mis en oeuvre.

‘Individuality’ is one of the central categories of modern society. Can the roots of modern individuality be found in pre-modern times? Or is our way of thinking about ourselves a very recent phenomenon? This book takes a theoretical approach to the problem, derived from Niklas Luhmann’s system theory, in which different forms of individuality are linked to different structures of society in modern and pre-modern times.

The papers in this volume approach this problem by discussing a broad variety of medieval and early modern sources, including charters and seals, letters, and naming practices in a late medieval town. Self-representation is also considered, in ‘housebooks’ and drawings. Textual studies include autobiography in German Humanism, and concepts of individuality and gender in late medieval literary texts.

The Dominican scholar John of Paris was one of the most controversial members of the University of Paris in the later Middle Ages. The author of over twenty works, he is best known today for On Royal and Papal Power, a tract traditionally linked to the explosive confrontation that took place between the French king Philip IV and Pope Boniface VIII in the early years of the fourteenth century. Although his role as a royal apologist has been questioned in recent years, John’s tract is often considered the first great defence of the independence of nation-states in the face of the claims to universal authority made by popes and emperors.

Bringing together a team of international scholars with a wide range of expertise, this volume offers the first collection of essays in any language to be dedicated to an exploration of John’s thought. It re-examines his view of the relationship between Church and state, and his conception of political organization. It considers the role played by John’s background as a member of the Dominican order in shaping his ideas and breaks new ground in exploring the relationship between his various works, the origins of his thought, its development, and its legacy.

Qu’est-ce que la « formularité » dans les savoirs et les pratiques médiévales? Comment s’illustre-t-elle entre expression individuelle et normes collectives, rituels et innovations, reprises d’un modèle et créativité? La présente publication rassemble un choix parmi les contributions présentées à l’occasion du grand colloque international qui s’est tenu à Nancy et Metz du 7 au 9 juin 2012, sur le thème de l’usage de la formule dans la culture médiévale. Le colloque a accueilli des médiévistes issus de toutes les disciplines, parmi lesquelles ont été retenues ici la diplomatique (sept articles), la littérature (sept articles, auxquels s’ajoutent deux contributions sur l’hagiographie, et une sur la littérature universitaire), l’iconographie et l’architecture, mais aussi l’étude des formules dans des domaines de la vie pratique comme la magie, la médecine et chez les hérauts d’armes.

« Breviarium totius evangelii » selon l’heureuse formule de Tertullien, la prière du « Notre Père » enseignée par Jésus à ses disciples apparaît, dans l’histoire de la chrétienté, comme un moyen capital de formation spirituelle et morale, aussi bien d’un individu que d’une communauté. Son message est dévoilé, renforcé et répandu grâce à la série de commentaires et d’autres ouvrages produits autour d’elle.

Au cours du xii e siècle, on assiste à des lectures renouvelées des sept demandes de l’oraison dominicale, suscitées par différents facteurs : la multiplication des écoles urbaines et la mise en place de nouveaux instruments de formation ; la nécessité de réformer l’Église à partir de perspectives diverses, autant ecclésiastiques que laïques ; un esprit attentif aux sources et aux auctoritates.

Le but de ce recueil est de mettre en lumière les divers mouvements d’appropriation et retransmission du « Notre Père » dans différents contextes institutionnels (les écoles, les communautés de religieux, etc.) et selon une multiplicité de réécritures.

Docteur en histoire de la philosophie et histoire des idées de l’Université de Rome La Sapienza, Francesco Siri est ingénieur de recherche auprès de l’I.R.H.T. de Paris. Ses travaux portent sur les maîtres en sacra pagina du xii e siècle et l’édition des textes médiolatins.

Medieval Coins and Seals: Constructing Identity, Signifying Power showcases these objects as intrinsic and highly significant aspects of medieval visual culture, and contributes to an understanding of the many ways in which they functioned as conveyors of meaning in Western European, Islamic, and Byzantine cultures from the fifth to the fifteenth century. The essays presented here, by art historians, numismatists, sigillographers, and historians on a wide variety of coins and seals, afford fresh insight into these tantalizing relics of medieval art and the vibrant cultural roles they played at the time of their creation. Through their images and inscriptions, they conveyed complex cultural attitudes by means of sophisticated visual strategies carefully constructed to further the subjective agendas of rulers and − in the case of seals − of aristocrats, ordinary individuals, towns, corporations, and government officials. The messages conveyed by these tightly controlled objects were, above all, ones of authority, identity, and legitimacy, with goals or subtexts that included the politics of self- presentation; the construction of personal, civic, national and cultural identity; the advertisement of dynastic succession; and much more. As forceful modes of visual discourse designed to carry calculated, at times propagandistic, communications to broadly dispersed audiences, coins and seals actively served during these centuries as sociocultural agents that helped mold public opinion (as they had in antiquity), and thereby shaped the medieval world.

This book of essays is dedicated to the memory of Riccardo Francovich, one of Europe’s most eminent Medieval archaeologists, who died in 2007. It began as a one-day conference held at the British School at Rome the day after Riccardo Francovich would have been 65 years old, on the 11 June 2011.

The book takes as its core theme a comparison of Italian and Spanish Medieval Archaeology, in each case challenging the status quo and attempting to move the boundaries of our historical discussions ever forwards. The volume attempts to evaluate if the Medieval Archaeology of these two important Mediterranean countries, largely unfamiliar on the international stage, with their different ‘histories’, can be compared. To do this, a key moment in their formation is reviewed - the passage from the Ancient to the Medieval world. This approach highlights not only the identifi cation of singular conjunctures (the impact of the new ‘barbaric’ aristocracies on the social structures of the Roman world, and how Islam was established, for example, in the peninsula as in Sicily), but also parallel evolutions at the macro-structural level (for example, conditions in towns and the countryside). Taking the paradigm of fragmentation as a basic starting-point that characterizes the western world after the fall of the Roman Empire, it offers comparative archaeologies in terms of themes, but above all else in terms of shared methods.

The present volume is the second in a series of three integrated publications, the first produced in 2013 as Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Hull Dialogue. Like that volume, this collection of essays, focused on various aspects of nuns’ literacies from the late seventh to the mid-sixteenth century, brings together the work of specialists to create a dialogue about the Latin and vernacular texts that were read, written, and exchanged by medieval nuns.

It investigates literacy from palaeographical and textual perspectives, evidence of book ownership and exchange, and other more external evidence, both literary and historical. To highlight the benefits of cross-cultural comparison, contributions include case studies focused on northern and southern Europe, as well as the extreme north and west of the region. A number of essays illustrate nuns’ active engagement with formal education, and with varied textual forms, such as the legal and epistolary, while others convey the different opportunities for studying examples of nuns’ artistic literacy. The various discussions included here build collectively on the first volume to demonstrate the comparative experiences of medieval female religious who were reading, writing, teaching, composing, and illustrating at different times and in diverse geographical areas throughout medieval Europe.

Martin Camargo, Professor of English, Medieval Studies, and Classics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is a beloved teacher, mentor, colleague, and the scholar whose work this collection celebrates. With interests in defining ‘medieval rhetoric’, understanding the history of both literary and bureaucratic epistles, explaining the revival of rhetorical studies in fourteenth-century England, editing texts for teaching the trivium, and excavating performance pedagogies in medieval language classrooms, Carmago has paved the way for scholars in many fields, including educational and institutional history; literature, language, and manuscript studies; and rhetoric in the Middle Ages.

This book pays tribute to his own ground-breaking research by presenting original and inventive new work in many of these fields. Authored by established scholars and innovative new researchers alike, the essays contained in this volume give significant scope to didactic medieval commentaries, theories of medieval rhetoric and language, literary epistles and the ars dictaminis, and poetry of various genres including romances and riddles, as well as to the classroom practices that all of these investigations infer. In keeping with Camargo’s generosity in sharing resources, the authors hope that their essays in turn will provide encouragement and suggestions for further work.

Embrassant toutes les strates du langage, de sa production à sa réception, les formes vers et prose sont dans une tension constante et évolutive, et invitent à s’interroger sur ce qui les sépare et les réunit, d’un point de vue parfois strictement linguistique, parfois plus largement rythmique, générique ou idéologique. Aussi travaillée soit-elle, la question des formes et des usages résiste toutefois à une théorisation générale, en raison de l’ampleur du phénomène et des présupposés culturels qu’elle engage. L’aborder sous l’angle de la rencontre, « rencontre » en son sens premier de « conflit », mais aussi en celui de « cohabitation, dialogue, échange », est une manière de contourner la difficulté. Ces rencontres, au pluriel donc, se produisent en effet dans divers lieux textuels, et à divers moments, du Moyen Âge à la Renaissance, dans une longue période où se dessinent et se formulent en langue française les expériences et les réflexions et où se dévoilent des imaginaires singuliers. Elles s’éclairent en outre à la lumière des pratiques enregistrées dans les langues voisines. La diversité et la complexité des formules révèlent que le jeu des formes est au cœur de l’identité des langues et de l’image mentale qu’elles renvoient.

Catherine Croizy-Naquet

est professeur de Littérature du Moyen Âge à l’Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, ses recherches portent essentiellement sur la littérature narrative médiévale, romans et récits historiques, en vers et en prose.

Michelle Szkilnik

est professeur de Littérature du Moyen Âge à l’Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, ses recherches portent sur le roman arthurien et sur la littérature de la fi n du Moyen Âge.

This is the third volume of the series “Rewriting the Middle Ages in the Twentieth Century”, focused this time on the medieval political thought.

This book offers an overview of the national and transnational traditions of the historiography and studies the main questions and the background of this discipline in the last century.

Essays for this new volume focus on the subject’s life, intellectual and academic training; discuss major works and historiographical heritage; and locate the medievalists who have contributed to the better understanding of medieval political thought, through their work in medieval studies. This interdisciplinary resource aims to include medievalists from different fields: history, art, literature, theology, among others.

Régine Le Jan a marqué de son empreinte l’histoire du haut Moyen Âge. Son oeuvre a accompagné l’évolution de la discipline historique depuis plus de quarante ans. Au gré de ses publications, de colloques, de programmes de recherche, de son enseignement, elle a donné à l’histoire du haut Moyen Âge des orientations inédites. Pour lui rendre hommage, ses collègues, amis et élèves se sont inspirés de quelques-uns de ses thèmes de recherche privilégiés au fil de trente articles rassemblés ici. Dans ce volume est d’abord envisagée l’importance de la famille et des liens de parenté dans les relations de pouvoir au haut Moyen Âge, rappelant l’ouvrage fondateur que fut sa thèse Famille et Pouvoir dans le monde franc (Publications de la Sorbonne, 1995). Sont ensuite évoquées celles dont elle a si bien montré le rôle essentiel par l’évocation de figures de femmes médiévales, tout en rappelant comment a continué à peser sur elles tout le poids d’une discrimination qui se poursuit pendant toute la période. Enfin, les auteurs reviennent sur l’usage des émotions et du vocabulaire de la haine et de l’amitié, dont la place ne cesse de croître à la fois dans les domaines social et politique au fil du haut Moyen Âge.

A seminal article published by Giles Constable in 1953 focused on the genesis and expansion in scope of the Second Crusade with particular attention to what has become known as the Syrian campaign. His central thesis maintained that by the spring of 1147 the Church “viewed and planned” the Second Crusade as a general Christian offensive against and the Muslims of Syria and the Iberian Peninsula and the pagan Wends of the southern Baltic lands. Constable's work remains extremely influential and provides the framework for the recent major works published on this extraordinary twelfth-century phenomenon. This volume aims to readdress scholarly predilections for concentrating on the venture in the Near East and for narrowly focusing on the accepted targets of the crusade. It aims instead to place established, contentious, and new events and concepts associated with the enterprise in a wider ideological, chronological, geopolitical, and geographical context.

Jason T. Roche is a Lecturer in Medieval History at Manchester Metropolitan University. His research interests cover the history of the crusades and the Latin East and the topography of medieval Anatolia and the Near East.

Janus Møller Jensen is head of department at Nyborg Castle, Museums of Eastern Funen, Denmark. His main research interests cover the history and historiography of the Crusades and Scandinavian medieval history.

This volume explores the relationships and interactions between medieval urban populations and their rural counterparts across north western Europe from the seventh to sixteenth centuries. This theme has become increasingly fragmented in recent decades, resulting in scholars being largely unaware of developments outside their own areas. The present volume brings together historians and archaeologists in order to highlight the varied ways in which town–country interactions can be considered, from perspectives that include economy, politics, natural environment, material culture, and settlement hierarchy. As a whole, the papers offer innovative interdisciplinary perspectives on the topic that create a new platform from which to understand more fully the complex, bilateral relationships in which both urban and rural spheres were able to influence and challenge each other. Contributions are wide-ranging, from the activities of elite, aristocratic groups in and around individual towns, to large-scale surveys covering wide areas. With coverage from the North Sea to the western Baltic, the book will be relevant to a range of disciplines including archaeology, history, and geography, and is aimed towards both advanced students and established scholars.

This book investigates how medieval and early modern Europeans constructed, understood, and articulated emotions. The essays trace concurrent lines of influence that shaped post-Classical understandings of emotions, through overlapping philosophical, rhetorical, and theological discourses. They show the effects of developments in genre and literary, aesthetic, and cognitive theories on depictions of psychological and embodied emotion in literature. They map the deeply embedded emotive content inherent in rituals, formal documents, daily conversation, communal practice, and cultural memory. The contributors focus on the mediation and interpretation of pre-modern emotional experience in cultural structures and institutions - customs, laws, courts, religious foundations - as well as in philosophical, literary, and aesthetic traditions.

The volume thus represents a conspectus of contemporary interpretative strategies, displaying close connections between disciplinary and interdisciplinary critical practices drawn from historical studies, literature, anthropology and archaeology, philosophy and theology, cognitive science, psychology, religious studies, and gender studies. The essays stretch from classical and indigenous cultures to the contemporary West, embracing numerous national and linguistic groups. They illuminate the complex potential of medieval and early modern emotions in situ, analysing their involvement in subjects as diverse as philosophical theories, imaginative and scholarly writing, concepts of individual and communal identity, social and political practices, and the manifold business of everyday life.

There has long been a tendency among monastic historians to ignore or marginalize female participation in monastic life, but recent scholarship has begun to redress the balance, and the great contributions made by women to the religious life of the Middle Ages are now attracting increasing attention. This interdisciplinary volume draws together scholars from Spain, Italy, France, the Low Countries, Germany, Transylvania, Scandinavia, and the British Isles, and offers new insights into the history, art history, and material culture, and the religiosity and culture of medieval religious women.

The different chapters within this book take a comparative approach to the emergence and spread of female monastic communities across different geographical, political, and economic settings, comparing and contrasting houses that ranged from rich, powerful royal abbeys to small, subsistence priories on the margins of society, and exploring the artistic achievements, the interaction with neighbours and secular and ecclesiastical authorities, and the spiritual lives that were led by their inhabitants. The contributors to this volume address issues as diverse as patronage and relationships with the outside world, organizational structures, the nature of Cistercian observance and identity among female houses, and the role of male authority, and in doing so, they seek to shed light on the divergences and commonalities upon which the female religious life was based.

While the huge historiographical production on medieval crusades mainly stresses the part played by princes, the aristocracy and military orders, the proceedings of the international congress held at the Università cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan on 9th-11th March 2011 focus on a topic which has received far less attention: the importance of the popes and their delegates in the organization before departure and the conduct of the armies sent to liberate the Holy Land in the 12th and 13th centuries. The recent revival of studies on the representation of the Supreme Pontiff has led to reconsider the actions of the papal governement in the crusades. In this volume, fourteen specialists throw new light on the clerks and prelates (cardinals, legates, nuncios, papal chaplains, etc.) who were commissioned by the popes to set up and lead crusades, on their origins and careers, on their methods of preaching and collecting taxes, on their diplomatic relations, on the obligations of their missions and their liberty to act, etc. Devoting greater attention to papal delegates will help to better understand the complex inner history of the military pilgrims to Jerusalem.

Maria Pia Alberzoni is Professor of medieval history at the Università cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan (Italy). Pascal Montaubin is Maître de conférences in medieval history at the Université de Picardie-Jules Verne in Amiens (France).