L'Agenda des Médiévistes

S’intéresser aux documents produits par Louis XI et son entourage – secrétaires, conseillers, chambellans, familiers – fait apparaître la pratique de gouvernement dans toute sa complexité. Quels sont les grands desseins du roi ? Ses ambitions dans les domaines de l’économie, ou la réforme de l’armée ? Réussit-il à atteindre ses objectifs ? Comment fait-il face à la contrainte, à la menace, voire au péril ? Autant de questions auxquelles le présent ouvrage esquisse des réponses. Se dessine un roi pragmatique, qui fait son affaire des circonstances et des aléas du quotidien, navigue à vue aussi parfois, tout en s’efforçant de transposer en actes ses grands desseins. La circulation de l’information constitue déjà un enjeu majeur au temps de Louis XI qui, par méfiance autant que par calcul, se préoccupe du contrôle de l’information, pratiquant au besoin la désinformation.

Informations pratiques :

Claude Jeay, Louis XI ou l’exercice du pouvoir. Gouverner par la signature, Paris, Éditions du CTHS, 2021 (CTHS Histoire, 65). 240 p., 62 ill., 15 x 22 cm. ISBN : 978-2-7355-0918-8. Prix : 28 euros.

Source : AFPU Diffusion

Polyphony and the Modern asks one fundamental question: what does it mean to be modern in one’s own time? To answer that question, this volume focuses on polyphony as an index of modernity.

In The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch showed that each moment in time is potentially fractured: people living in the same country can effectively live in different centuries – some making their alliances with the past and others betting on the future – but all of them, at least technically, enclosed in the temporal moment. But can a claim of modernity also mean something more ambitious? Can an artist, by accident or design, escape the limits of his or her own time, and somehow precociously embody the outlook of a subsequent age?

This booksees polyphony as a bridge providing a terminology and a stylistic practice by which the period barrier between Medieval and Early Modern can be breached.

Jonathan Fruoco is a Reseearch Fellow affiliated to the CEMA, Sorbonne University. His research focuses on the linguistic and cultural evolution of medieval England, with a particular interest in the work of Geoffrey Chaucer and its connection with French and Italian courtly poetry. He has recently published Les faits et gestes de Robin des Bois　(2017) and Chaucer’s Polyphony: The Modern in Medieval Poetry (2020).

Table des matières :

Introduction: Towards Modernity – Jonathan Fruoco

Part One: Machaut and Musical Polyphony

Chapter I. The Polyphony of Function: Mixing Text and Music in Guillaume de Machaut – Uri Smilansky
Chapter II. The Multilevel Polyphony of Machaut’s Livre dou Voir Dit and its Afterlife – Rosemarie McGerr

Part Two: Polyphony in Medieval Europe

Chapter III. Cemeteries and Tombstones as Polyphonic Places in the French Medieval Quest of Lancelot – Laurence Doucet
Chapter IV. Polyphonic Effects in the Fixed-Form Verse of Eustache Deschamps: A Critical Practice – Laura Kendrick
Chapter V. ‘Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse’: Liminal Polyvocality in the Occitan Literary Use of Dante – Paola M. Rodriguez
Chapter VI. Novelistic Perspectivism in Béroul’s Roman de Tristan – Teodoro Patera
Chapter VII. Textual Voices in Compilation: Reading the Polyphony of Medieval Manuscripts – Amy Heneveld
Chapter VIII. Wolfram and the Ambiguity of the Religious Question in the Willehalm – Patrick del Duca

Part Three: From Medieval England to the Early Modern

Chapter IX. Chaucer’s Speech and Thought Representation in Troilus and Criseyde: Encoded Subjectivities and Semantic Extension – Yoshiyuki Nakao
Chapter X Chaucer and the Streams of Parnassus – Paul Strohm
Chapter XI. « ´Tis more ancient than Chaucer Himself »: Keats and Romantic Polyphony – Caroline Bertonèche

Part Four: Towards Modernity

Chapter XII. Evelina’s « Pollyphony » – Anne Rouhette
Chapter XIII. The Whirl of the Red, Green, and Blue: Christopher Anstey and the Particoloured Poem – Peter Merchant
Chapter XIV. Towards Modernity. Nova et vetera in Paul Claudel’s Book of Christopher Colombus – Jean-François Poisson-Gueffier

Informations pratiques :

Polyphony and the Modern, dir. Jonathan Fruoco, Abingdon-on-Thames, Routledge, 2021 (Routledge Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture). 272 Pages, 5 B/W Illustrations. ISBN : 9780367655150. Prix : GBP : 130.

Source : Routledge

« How do we approach the study of masculinity in the past? » Ruth Mazo Karras asks. Medieval documents that have come down to us tell a great deal about the things that men did, but not enough about what they did specifically as men, or what these practices meant to them in terms of masculinity. Yet no less than in our own time, masculinity was a complicated construct in the Middle Ages.

In Thou Art the Man, Karras focuses on one figure, King David, who was important in both Christian and Jewish medieval cultures, to show how he epitomized many and sometimes contradictory aspects of masculine identity. For late medieval Christians, he was one of the Nine Worthies, held up as a model of valor and virtue; for medieval Jews, he was the paradigmatic king, not just a remnant of the past, but part of a living heritage. In both traditions he was warrior, lover, and friend, founder of a dynasty and a sacred poet. But how could an exemplar of virtue also be a murderer and adulterer? How could a physical weakling be a great warrior? How could someone whose claim to the throne was not dynastic be a key symbol of the importance of dynasty? And how could someone who dances with slaves be noble?

Exploring the different configurations of David in biblical and Talmudic commentaries, in Latin, Hebrew, and vernacular literatures across Europe, in liturgy, and in the visual arts, Thou Art the Man offers a rich case study of how ideas and ideals of masculinity could bend to support a variety of purposes within and across medieval cultures.

Ruth Mazo Karras is Lecky Professor of History at Trinity College Dublin. She is author of, among other books, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe and Unmarriages: Women, Men, and Sexual Unions in the Middle Ages, both available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Informations pratiques :

Ruth Mazo Karras, Thou Art the Man. The Masculinity of David in the Christian and Jewish Middle Ages, Ithaca, UPenn Press, 2021. 368 pages | 6 x 9 | 28 halftones. ISBN 9780812253023. Prix : GBP 48,00.

Source : UPenn Press

Au Moyen Âge, l’épopée française a exporté son patrimoine formel et thématique au-delà de ses propres frontières, génériques et géographiques. Les études réunies dans ce volume explorent différentes modalités et trajectoires du réemploi de la matière épique dans l’espace roman médiéval.

Table des matières : ici

Informations pratiques :

La Matière épique dans l’Europe romane au Moyen Âge. Persistances et trajectoires, dir. Anna Constantinidis et Cesare Mascitelli, Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2021 (Rencontres, n° 493 ; Civilisation médiévale, n° 41). 240 p., ISBN : 978-2-406-11098-9. Prix : 24 euros.

Source : Classiques Garnier

Mentre inizia a Carpentras (primavera 1314) il conclave per scegliere il successore di Clemente V, Dante scrive ai cardinali italiani. Come un nuovo Geremia, lamenta l’avvenuto abbandono di Roma e li implora di trovare un’intesa contro i guasconi e lottare per un papa che chiuda la fase avignonese. L’appello prende forza dall’invettiva contro il defunto Matteo Rosso Orsini e il cugino Napoleone. L’antica inimicizia e le irriducibili divergenze fra i potenti cardinali romani avevano bloccato a lungo il conclave precedente, da cui era uscito infine eletto, a sorpresa, l’arcivescovo di Bordeaux (1305). Dante li rimprovera in quanto principali responsabili di quella scelta dannosa, frutto di calcoli infondati, puntigli ottusi, accordi sacrileghi, da lui rievocati in scatti rapidi e allusivi.

Il testo della Lettera, conservato in un solo manoscritto allestito dal giovane Boccaccio, è ricco di acrobazie sintattiche ed espressioni oscure. Creduto pieno di errori di copiatura, è stato sottoposto dai critici a correzioni spesso disinvolte e arbitrarie. Questo libro ritorna al testo tramandato e ne dà una nuova edizione il più possibile aderente ad esso. Decifrando integralmente per la prima volta riferimenti a personaggi, vicende e scritti dell’epoca, recupera una fonte importante per la storia della Chiesa romana dall’abdicazione di Celestino V al primo decennio avignonese. Conoscitore disincantato di conflitti di poteri e dinamiche di corruzione nelle gerarchie, Dante incarna una figura nuova di intellettuale, di laico che nella Chiesa rivendica la parola in virtù della sua fede e conoscenza dei fatti. Qui il poeta e letterato si presenta come profeta, fiero di proclamare da solo e dal basso ciò che tutti sanno, ma nessuno ha il coraggio di dire. Il testo non è un’esercitazione letteraria né una lettera aperta, ma un drammatico richiamo a non rassegnarsi e ad agire al più presto. Ricevuta e letta dai cardinali italiani, la Lettera offrì a Napoleone Orsini una traccia per la sua richiesta di aiuto rivolta poco dopo a Filippo il Bello: ultimo, vano tentativo di rovesciare l’esito di una prova ormai impari.

Gian Luca Potestà, ordinario di Storia del cristianesimo all’Università Cattolica di Milano, è studioso di profetismo, apocalittica e messianismi dell’Occidente medievale. Tra i suoi volumi, tradotti in varie lingue, Il tempo dell’Apocalisse. Vita di Gioacchino da Fiore (Laterza 2004), L’ultimo messia. Profezia e sovranità nel Medioevo (il Mulino 2014) e L’Anticristo (in coll., 3 voll., Fondazione Valla – Mondadori 2005-2019).

Informations pratiques :

Gian Luca Potestà. Dante in conclave. La Lettera ai cardinali. (Cultura e storia, 39). Milano, Vita e pensiero, 2021. 23 x 16 cm, 232 p. € 23. ISBN 978-8834343760.

Source : Vita e pensiero