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Ce volume qui renferme 57 contributions portant sur la littérature médiolatine rend hommage à Pascale Bourgain, Professeur émérite d’Histoire et tradition manuscrite des textes littéraires à l’École nationale des chartes. Ces Mélanges peuvent se lire comme une histoire littéraire du Moyen Âge latin. Toute la période médiévale est en effet couverte largement, du v e siècle à la Renaissance et, au-delà, jusqu’aux entreprises du xix e siècle pour redonner vie aux anciens textes. Les œuvres relevant de ces divers champs et temps sont analysées en faisant converger sur elles l’éclairage d’une ou, souvent, de plusieurs disciplines parmi celles qui portent sur le manuscrit : codicologie, histoire de l’enluminure, histoire des bibliothèques ; ou sur les textes qu’il transmet : édition critique, histoire littéraire et critique d’attribution ; sur leurs relations d’influence, de la Quellenforschung à l’analyse des inflexions que subit un même passage repris d’une œuvre à l’autre ; sur la langue de ces textes : lexicographie, grammaire, art de la traduction, étude des interactions entre langues latine et romanes ; sur leur forme littéraire, d’une poésie de facture classique à la prose d’art en passant par la poésie rythmique ; sur enfin ce qu’il y a de plus subtil à décrire dans les textes, leur style, et la manière dont style et sens, loin de s’opposer, s’épousent.

Souvent présentée comme une période charnière, la « Renaissance du xii e siècle » voit fleurir les écoles : école de Laon, de Saint-Victor, de Paris, de Chartres, école d’Abélard aussi, auxquelles on peut ajouter le groupe formé par les Porrétains ou bien encore les « écoles du cloître » (chartreux, cisterciens, clunisiens). L’« âge des écoles » marque ainsi le passage d’une forme de vie intellectuelle à une autre, l’évolution de la culture monastique vers la culture urbaine, qui verra la naissance de l’université de Paris au xiii e siècle et l’avènement de la scolastique. Au moment où se produit un tel essor, la littérature en langue romane connaît une seconde naissance. La langue d’oc voit s’épanouir la lyrique tandis qu’au nord de la Loire, dès les dernières années du xi e siècle, les chansons de geste se répandent, avant que les romans et la poésie des trouvères ne fassent leur apparition. Loin d’être étrangers l’un à l’autre, ces deux phénomènes entretiennent des rapports nombreux et complexes qui valent d’autant plus d’être étudiés que le retentissement de ces écoles de pensée sur la littérature romane est perceptible bien au-delà du xii e siècle. Telle est l’ambition de cet ouvrage, qui propose un bilan historiographique, de nombreuses études de cas et une réflexion à caractère épistémologique.

This volume presents cultural studies approaches to different modes of memoria (the original medieval way of commemoration), taking into account specific confessional contexts. It mainly focuses on the consequences of political, religious and social reforms in the period from 1200 to 1800. Scholars from multiple subject areas in the field of cultural studies evaluate if, and to what extent, reform processes and political or social change have influenced different practices of memoria.

Since customs of commemoration of the dead (and the living) serve as a means of self-reassurance for a society, they allow significant insights into what the respective societies were grounded upon. This volume delivers the first discipline-specific and methodologically diverse approach to the consequences of different reforms on memoria.

In this way this overview creates a ‘history of memoria’ throughout the centuries.

The textuality and materiality of documents are an essential part of their communicative role. Medieval writing, as part of the interpersonal communication process, had to follow rules to ensure the legibility and understanding of a text and its connotations. This volume provides new insights into how different kinds of rules were designed, established, and followed in the shaping of medieval documents, as a means of enabling complex and subtle communicational phenomena. Because they provide a perspective for approaching the material they are supposed to organize, these rules (or the postulation of their use) provide powerful analytical tools for structural studies into given corpora of documents.

Originating in talks given at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds between 2010 and 2012, the twenty papers in this collection offer a precise, in-depth analysis of a variety of medieval scripts, including books, charters, accounts, and epigraphic documents. In doing so, they integrate current developments in palaeography, diplomatics, and codicology in their traditional methodological set, as well as aspects of the digital humanities, and they bridge the gap between the so-called ‘auxiliary sciences of history’ and the field of communication studies. They illustrate different possibilities for exploring how the formal aspects of scripts took their place in the construction of effective communication structures.

Conversion to Christianity is arguably the most revolutionary social and cultural change that Europe experienced throughout Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Christianisation affected all strata of society and transformed not only religious beliefs and practices, but also the nature of government, the priorities of the economy, the character of kinship, and gender relations. It is against this backdrop that an international array of leading medievalists gathered under the auspices of the Converting the Isles Research Network (funded by the Leverhulme Trust) to investigate social, economic, and cultural aspects of conversion in the early medieval Insular world, covering different parts of Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia, and Iceland.

This is is the first of two volumes showcasing research generated through the ‘Converting the Isles’ Network. This volume focuses on specific aspects of the introduction of Christianity into the early medieval Insular world, including the nature and degree of missionary activity involved, socio-economic stimulants for conversion, as well as the depiction and presentation of a Christian saint. Its companion volume has the transformation of landscape as its main theme. By adopting a broad comparative and crossdisciplinary approach that transcends national boundaries, the material presented here and in volume II offers novel perspectives on conversion that challenge existing historiographical narratives and draw on up-to-date archaeological and written evidence in order to shed light on central issues pertaining to the conversion of the Isles.

The Prague Sacramentary is a unique liturgical manuscript which can be very precisely located in a specific social and historical context. It was written in the turbulent period when Charlemagne crossed Bavaria to fight the Avars and when his son Pippin rebelled against him, seeking support among the Bavarian nobility. The manuscript can be linked to specific groups of Bavarian elites that had to come to terms with this explosive political situation. It also elucidates the ways in which Christian culture was expressed and experienced in Bavaria at the end of the eighth century. Although Bavaria may be regarded as a periphery from a Frankish perspective, it was certainly no cultural backwater. Because of its geographical position at the crossroads of Italian, Bavarian, and Frankish culture, Bavaria produced unique and intriguing texts and artefacts.

One such object is analysed here by a team of experts, shedding renewed light on the earthly and heavenly concerns of an early medieval community in a specific region. It includes a discussion of the topics of the formal invocation of saints, vernacular understandings of Latin texts, marriage, politics, and concerns for ritual purity as well as the well-being of the conflict-ridden Carolingian family.

In the most recent years a group of young researchers has given a new impetus to the study of Book Illumination in Portugal, promoting national and international research that focuses on understanding illuminated manuscripts in both their aesthetics and material dimensions, as well as the relationship between text and image. The developement of interdisciplinary research thanks, in part, to strategic partnerships between the Humanities and the domain of Exact Science has been established to address new issues raised by the need of more comprehensive and wide studies around the illuminated manuscript.

This volume gives thus light to the most important contributions of these new approaches, including new technical studies of pigments in manuscripts of the fund of the Monastery of Alcobaça and three copies of Hugh of Fouilloy’s Book of Birds, inquiries concerning a mismounted mappamundiin the Lorvão Beatus, a study of two southern French legal manuscripts, the image of the artist in astrological iconography, problems raised by two books of hours in the National Library of Portugal, and penwork decoration in fifteenth-century Hebrew manuscripts.

The authors of the volume belong to three Portuguese academic institutions. Maria Adelaide Miranda, Alicia Miguélez Cavero, Catarina Fernandes Barreira, Maria Alessandra Bilotta, Ana Lemos and Luís Ribeiro are integrated members of the Institute of Medieval Studies of the Nova University of Lisbon; Maria João Melo, Rita Castro, Conceição Casanova, Vania Solange Muralhas e Rita Araújo are members of the Department of Conservation and Restoration of the Nova University of Lisbon; Luís Urbano Afonso e Tiago Moita are members of the Institute of History of Art of the University of Lisbon.

Le présent volume se propose, à travers des approches comparatives appliquées à un corpus de textes d’histoire appartenant à des périodes et des milieux différents, d’aboutir à une compréhension plus approfondie de l’infl uence de la typologie et des images bibliques sur l’historiographie du Moyen Âge: historiae, chronica, gesta, annales, vitae, epistolae, etc. Il s’agit, en effet, d’un aspect souvent négligé de l’historiographie médiévale, en raison, probablement, des controverses théoriques qui entourent le domaine. Cette publication devrait fournir de nouveaux outils de travail qui seront des apports précieux pour tous ceux qui s’intéressent à l’historiographie à l’époque médiévale.