L'Agenda des Médiévistes

This volume demonstrates the continued vitality of the history of the Capetians to the study of the medieval world. In this volume, thirteen of the world’s leading scholars of medieval France explore some of the most important ideas, events, personalities, and artistic creations of the Capetian world (987–1328). From some of the earliest medieval attempts to make narrative treatments of French history, through the invention of the schools, the creation of Gothic architecture, the practices of chivalry, the practice of statecraft, and the promulgation of law codes, the volume offers a panoramic view of the kingdom and the era that has come to define the medieval world in both the scholarly and popular imaginations. The scholars brought together in this volume share as well a common sense of gratitude and an intellectual debt to Elizabeth A. R. Brown, whose own rigour and brilliance has inspired their work and shaped their sense of the past. Political Ritual and Practice in Capetian France is both a tribute to a scholar of real accomplishment and a collection of original scholarship raised upon on the foundations that Elizabeth A. R. Brown herself set down.

Table des matières :

List of Illustrations, List of Contributors

Introduction
Jay Rubenstein and M. Cecilia Gaposchkin

Sugar: An Abbot’s Fame
Rolf Grosse

Suger, Orderic Vitalis, and the Vexin: Some Observations on Bibliothèque Mazarine MS 2013
Elisabeth van Houts

Countess Blanche, Philip Augustus, and the War of Succession in Champagne, 1201–22
Theodore Evergates

‘Those Who Act More Strictly’: Monks, Jews, and Capetian Religious Politics in the Bibles moralisées
Sara Lipton

Eudes of Châteauroux and the Holy Blood of Neuvy-Saint-Sépulchre
Nicholas Vincent

Philippe of Cahors: Or, What’s in a Name?
William Chester Jordan

Jean d’Acre, Butler of France, Diplomat and High Servant of the Capetian Crown (d. January 8, 1296)
Xavier Hélary

Louis IX, Heraclius, and the True Cross at the Sainte Chapelle
M. Cecilia Gaposchkin

Writing and Illustrating History in Thirteenth Century France: The Chronique de l’anonyme de Béthune and Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum historiale
Alison Stones

Jacob of Santa Sabina Warns Philip the Fair that Boniface VIII is Antichrist by Means of Scripture and the Oraculum Cyrilli
Robert E. Lerner

The Templar Confessions in Bigorre, December 1307 and March 1308
Sean L. Field

The Capetians and the River Seine (Thirteenth-Fourteenth Century)
Elisabeth Lalou

The Judicial Duel in Later Medieval France: Procedure, Ceremony, and Status
Justine Firnhaber-Baker

Index

Informations pratiques :

Political Ritual and Practice in Capetian France. Studies in Honour of Elizabeth A. R. Brown, ed. M. Cecilia Gaposchkin and Jay Rubenstein, Turnhout, Brepols, 2021 (Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, 34). 457 p., 27 b/w ill. + 9 colour ill., 2 b/w tables, 3 b/w line art, 156 x 234 mm. ISBN: 978-2-503-59302-9. Prix : 155 euros.

Source : Brepols

La lecture de La Divine Comédie est un voyage. Claudel le définit à merveille : « De celle qu’il aime, Dante n’a pas accepté d’être séparé, et son œuvre n’est qu’une espèce d’effort immense de l’intelligence et de l’imagination pour réunir ce monde de l’épreuve où il se traîne, ce monde des effets, qui, vu d’où nous sommes, semble le domaine du hasard ou d’une mécanique incompréhensible, au monde des causes et des fins. » Le lecteur n’est jamais seul au cours de son ascension. Si Dante a besoin de guides – Virgile, Béatrice, saint Bernard -, il est lui-même l’accompagnateur et le complice de qui le lit. Les expériences qu’il évoque, il considère qu’elles sont communes à tous. Il apprivoise l’imagination en l’entourant d’objets familiers. Une fois encordé au poète, et captif de sa voix, on ne peut demeurer en arrière. « On n’avait pas entendu cette voix depuis l’Antiquité latine », disait Saint-John Perse. Plus qu’un autre sans doute, le lecteur du XXI^e siècle est sensible à la conscience artistique qui habite Dante, à la manière dont il invente et manie d’un même geste la langue dont il use – « un acte qui vaut pour tous les temps, celui par lequel la poésie accède à soi » (Yves Bonnefoy). Dans cette édition, publiée à l’occasion du 700^e anniversaire de la mort du poète, la traduction de Jacqueline Risset, d’une limpidité sans égale, voisine avec le texte original et bénéficie d’un appareil critique nouveau qui prend appui sur sept siècles de lectures aussi bien que sur les recherches les plus récentes.

Informations pratiques :

Dante, La Divine Comédie, Paris, Gallimard, 2021 (La Pléaide, 659). Trad. de l’italien par Jacqueline Risset. Édition publiée sous la direction de Carlo Ossola avec la collaboration de Jean-Pierre Ferrini, Luca Fiorentini, Ilaria Gallinaro et Pasquale Porro. Parution le 14 Octobre 2021. 1488 pages, rel. Peau, 104 x 169 mm. Prix de lancement : 62 euros.

Source : Gallimard

« Barbara Newman’s The Permeable Self takes readers on a journey that explores the inner workings of extremely complex human and symbolic relationships. Centered on the concepts of coinherence and indwelling, her book ranges widely from topics like saintly telepathy, the exchange of hearts, and childbirth to the demonic invasion of human bodies. The common thread is humans’ permeability, their openness to both good and evil others. In clear, accessible, and often witty prose, Newman provides extraordinary insights into the medieval psyche. »—Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, author of The Strange Case of Ermine de Reims: A Medieval Woman Between Demons and Saints

« Charles Taylor has contrasted the ‘buffered self’ of a secular age to the ‘porous self’ of other ages. In The Permeable Self Barbara Newman fleshes out medieval understandings of porous personhood in fascinating detail, supplementing, but also correcting, Taylor’s influential account. Her many insights about medieval personhood have profound relevance to debates about the intersubjectivity of modern liberalism and postmodernism’s liquid selves. »—Ryan McDermott, University of Pittsburgh

« The Permeable Self is a brilliant exploration of medieval ways of imagining mind and body. Teaching, love, pregnancy and mental illness look startlingly different when people take for granted that thoughts can enter other bodies directly. That in turn should push readers to ask how modern assumptions shape modern experience in ways so fundamental we may not notice them. One of the most fascinating books I have read this year. »—T. M. Luhrmann, author of How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others

How, Barbara Newman asks, did the myth of the separable heart take such a firm hold in the Middle Ages, from lovers exchanging hearts with one another to mystics exchanging hearts with Jesus? What special traits gave both saints and demoniacs their ability to read minds? Why were mothers who died in childbirth buried in unconsecrated ground? Each of these phenomena, as diverse as they are, offers evidence for a distinctive medieval idea of the person in sharp contrast to that of the modern « subject » of « individual. »

Starting from the premise that the medieval self was more permeable than its modern counterpart, Newman explores the ways in which the self’s porous boundaries admitted openness to penetration by divine and demonic spirits and even by other human beings. She takes up the idea of « coinherence, » a state familiarly expressed in the amorous and devotional formula « I in you and you in me, » to consider the theory and practice of exchanging the self with others in five relational contexts of increasing intimacy. Moving from the outside in, her chapters deal with charismatic teachers and their students, mind-reading saints and their penitents, lovers trading hearts, pregnant mothers who metaphorically and literally carry their children within, and women and men in the throes of demonic obsession. In a provocative conclusion, she sketches some of the far-reaching consequences of this type of personhood by drawing on comparative work in cultural history, literary criticism, anthropology, psychology, and ethics.

The Permeable Self offers medievalists new insight into the appeal and dangers of the erotics of pedagogy; the remarkable influence of courtly romance conventions on hagiography and mysticism; and the unexpected ways that pregnancy—often devalued in mothers—could be positively ascribed to men, virgins, and God. The half-forgotten but vital idea of coinherence is of relevance far beyond medieval studies, however, as Newman shows how it reverberates in such puzzling phenomena as telepathy, the experience of heart transplant recipients who develop relationships with their deceased donors, the phenomenon of psychoanalytic transference, even the continuities between ideas of demonic possession and contemporary understandings of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

In The Permeable Self Barbara Newman once again confirms her status as one of our most brilliant and thought-provoking interpreters of the Middle Ages.

Barbara Newman is John Evans Professor of Latin and Professor of English, Classics, and History at Northwestern University. Among her many books are From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages, and Making Love in the Twelfth Century: « Letters of Two Lovers » in Context, all available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Table des matières :

Introduction. Members of One Another
Chapter 1. Teacher and Student: Shaping Boys
Chapter 2. Saint and Sinner: Reading Minds
Chapter 3. Lovers: Exchanging Hearts
Chapter 4. Mother and Child: Giving Birth
Chapter 5. God and the Devil: Possessing Souls
Conclusion, or Why It Still Matters
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments

Informations pratiques :

Barbara Newman, The Permeable Self. Five Medieval Relationships, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. 440 pages. ISBN : 9780812253344. Prix : USD $69.95

Source : University of Pennsylvania Press

Ce livre exhume la mémoire de quatre aventuriers dont les voyages se sont déroulés entre les années 1390 et 1450 : Ogier d’Anglure, Nompar de Caumont, Guillebert de Lannoy et Bertrandon de la Broquière. Pourquoi réunir ces quatre aventuriers dans un même livre ? Ensemble, ils embrassent les différentes formes du voyage nobiliaire et ils commencent à écrire eux-mêmes le récit de leurs voyages et posent les jalons d’un genre littéraire émergent.

Jaroslav Svátek est maître de conférences à la faculté de lettres de l’université Charles de Prague et membre du Centre d’études médiévales de l’Académie des sciences de la République tchèque.

Informations pratiques :

Jaroslav Svátek, Prier, combattre et voir le monde. Discours et récits de nobles voyageurs à la fin du Moyen Âge, Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2021 (Interférences). 356 p., 21 x 15,5 cm. ISBN : 9782753582583. Prix : 25 euros.

Source : Presses universitaires de Rennes