Pecia

Honouring the memory of François Duine (1870-1924), the historian-priest of Dol, is also an opportunity to recognize the important role of saint Samson in Breton national history and the influence of his cult beyond the borders of his bishopric. It seemed useful therefore to establish a list of his relics that helped exalt his fame, and in a broader context, to present a survey of the liturgical books of the diocese of Dol, whose history has left its mark on Brittany.

The Lives of Saint Malo, written between the 9th and 11th centuries, trace the life of the saint and the formation of the bishopric of Alet. The authors pursue distinct objectives : Bili defends the belonging of Alet to the ecclesiastical province of Tours, while the Anonymous supports the link with the bishopric of Dol. Detached from the figure of Saint Malo, these Lives of Saints offer, in the background, a topography of the sacred and territorial stakes. The confrontation of hagiographic, diplomatic and archaeological sources sheds light on the genesis of the bishopric of Alet and the constitution of its temporalities in the Carolingian era.

This paper will explore those nine Gospel-books that comprise the so-called ’Landévennec Group’. All dating between c. 850-c. 1000, these Gospel-books have been grouped together and assigned a Landévennec origin based mostly on art historical purposes. This paper will explore this group from a palaeographic and codicological point of view to firstly examine each of the Gospel-book’s script and physical construction, and then to secondly ascertain what – if any – connections exist between the members of this group.

This article aims to enhance the heritage of Guy-Alexis Lobineau, Maurist, contemporary of Jean Mabillon, first provincial historian within the Congregation of Saint-Maur where this genre will become after him one of the axes of scholarly work. Succeeding in 1707 in compiling, writing and publishing the “History of Brittany”, his native province, he installed principles of recourse to sources such as pièces justificatives, “proofs” of past events ; their deciphering, critical analysis and publication with the historical narrative itself ; interest not only in the written word, but also in materials such as tombs, seals and coins. Despite this aspiration for critical impartiality compared to his predecessors-chroniclers, Dom Lobineau was pursued by the great noble families of Rohan whose genealogy he had refuted, but even under this omnipresent influence of the great he chose the historical truth.

Manuscripts, incunabula, books and registers preserved in Breton archives and libraries sometimes contain religious watermarks such as Greek crosses, Latin crosses, crosses of Saint Andrew and other forms. On their own scale, they reflect the presence of belief and its evolution. In addition to their polysemous nature and diverse functions, watermarks seem to reflect the state of thought in a society, through the borrowings they make from religious symbolism. This polysemy and diversity of motifs give them a variety of meanings and interpretations depending on the papermaker who created them and the user. This article describes and analyses the polysemy of some of these religious imprints in Breton and Belgian documents from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

The notion of devotional sensorium is related to the vitality and variety of the medieval sensorium and points out changing sensory relationships, connected to inter-sensory, synaesthesia and the significant impact of votive objects, whose materiality operates in the social and institutional determination of religious practices that are, in their origin, individual and/or specific. This concept links to that of sacral sensorium or hagiosensorium but they are not the same. While last one has a hierarchical orientation from “top down”, since ecclesiastical, legal and politic authorities impose it on the social body through normative texts, regulated practices and controls, the first one proceeds from “bottom up”, as it is the same devotee who carries out a practice, framed in a personal experience, which will enter the orthodoxy through diverse texts collecting the experience through specific rhetorical images, mainly by popular diffusion.

In the relationship of these conceptualizations, which refer to differentiated instances of religious medieval practice, we will analyse the role that textualization plays in the transition from one sensorium to another. We will consider specifically some miraculous stories compiled in Los Milagros de Guadalupe (LMG).

That compilation went through various instances of discursive production, a process that indicates the coexistence and the interdiscursive relationships between oral communities and literate intellectual groups or elites. In this way, the written text of LMG constitutes the means by which the literate producers establish a sensitive and empathetic link between the subjects of the statement –the Christian captives– and the rest of the devotees of the Virgin of Guadalupe to promote the cult and pilgrimage to the Sanctuary. In addition, the work is fundamental for, on the one hand, fixing the miraculous acts of Mary in the collective memory and, on the other, sacralising and institutionalizing individual pious experiences, that is, moving from the devotional sensorium to the hagiosensorium.

Following an initial list of Breton copyists in the Middle Ages, it seemed appropriate to carry out a similar study of the booksellers who played a crucial role in the Breton diaspora to Paris, starting from the end of the 13th century, at the time of the development of universities. Although this list is not exhaustive, it enables us to track the activities of Bretons in the book trade, particularly those from the more remote dioceses of Lower Brittany, Quimper and Saint-Pol-de-Léon.