L'Agenda des Médiévistes

Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography presents an interdisciplinary examination of trans and genderqueer subjects in medieval hagiography. Scholarship has productively combined analysis of medieval literary texts with modern queer theory – yet, too often, questions of gender are explored almost exclusively through a prism of sexuality, rather than gender identity. This volume moves beyond such limitations, foregrounding the richness of hagiography as a genre integrally resistant to limiting binaristic categories, including rigid gender binaries. The collection showcases scholarship by emerging trans and genderqueer authors, as well as the work of established researchers. Working at the vanguard of historical trans studies, these scholars demonstrate the vital and vitally political nature of their work as medievalists. Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography enables the re-creation of a lineage linking modern trans and genderqueer individuals to their medieval ancestors, providing models of queer identity where much scholarship has insisted there were none, and re-establishing the place of non-normative gender in history.

Alicia Spencer-Hall is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Queen Mary University of London (UK). Her research interests include medieval hagiography, disability, gender, digital culture, and film and media studies.

Blake Gutt is a postdoctoral scholar with the Michigan Society of Fellows (University of Michigan, USA). He specializes in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century French, Occitan and Catalan literature, and modern queer and trans theory.

Informations pratiques :

Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, éd. Alicia Spencer-Hall et Blake Gutt, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2021. 342 p., 15.6 x 23.4 cm. ISBN : 9789462988248. Prix : 109 euros.

Source : Amsterdam University Press

Notre-Dame de L’Épine, « splendide fleur de l’architecture gothique » ( V. Hugo ) a jailli sur la plaine champenoise au XVe siècle, comme une petite cathédrale des champs. Depuis elle ne cesse d’étonner les voyageurs et de voir affluer les pèlerins. Construite pour accueillir les nombreux fidèles, la basilique entreprise en pleine Guerre de Cent Ans surprend par sa monumentalité.

Ce livre retrace six siècles d’histoire du sanctuaire marqués par des embellies ( des « recharges sacrales » ) et parfois des temps de reflux. Le dynamisme et le rayonnement du sanctuaire ont beaucoup fluctué. À l’origine, L’Épine, à proximité de Châlons-en-Champagne, était presque un pèlerinage péri-urbain pour les Châlonnais, attirant occasionnellement des pèlerins plus lointains. Se trouvant sur un axe est-ouest, le village et le sanctuaire sont, depuis les origines, halte pour les voyageurs et les pèlerins en itinérance vers les lieux plus lointains. À la fin de l’Ancien Régime, malgré des tentatives pour accorder les pratiques à l’esprit de la réforme catholique, le sanctuaire n’attirait plus guère que des ruraux, le pèlerinage, pratique traditionnelle, creuse le décalage avec les efforts pastoraux de l’Église. Dans le réveil spectaculaire du pèlerinage au XIXe siècle, se mêle une part de spontanéité et des offensives du clergé pour relancer et mieux encadrer les pèlerinages.

La pratique pèlerine a évolué, entre ses tendances individuelles et collectives, spontanées ou encadrées dans une pastorale. Des récits légendaires aux images de dévotion, s’est dessiné un imaginaire pèlerin. La Vierge de L’Épine, honorée depuis les temps troublés de la Guerre de Cent Ans, est la mère des souffrants, la Vierge du Stabat Mater, au pied de la Croix. Mais c’est aussi la protectrice de l’enfance, L’Épine étant devenu un sanctuaire, tout spécialement consacré aux enfants.

Table des matières : ici

Informations pratiques :

Jean-Baptiste Renault, Marie au buisson ardent. Notre-Dame de L’Épine, pèlerinage champenois, Nancy, Presses universitaires de Nancy – Editions Universitaires de Lorraine, 2021 (Archéologie, Espaces, Patrimoines). 326 p. ISBN : 9782814305694. Prix : 22 euros.

Source : LCPDU

In early Christianity it was established that every church should have a light burning on the altar at all times. In this unique study, Eternal light and earthly concerns, looks at the material and social consequences of maintaining these ‘eternal’ lights. It investigates how the cost of lighting was met across western Europe throughout the whole of the Middle Ages, revealing the social organisation that was built up around maintaining the lights in the belief that burning them reduced the time spent in Purgatory. When that belief collapsed in the Reformation the eternal lights were summarily extinguished. The history of the lights thus offers not only a new account of change in medieval Europe, but also a sustained examination of the relationship between materiality and belief.

Paul Fouracre is Professor Emeritus of Medieval History at the University of Manchester

Table des matières :

Introduction
1 Beginnings
2 Consolidation of provision: elite practice
3 Light and power: the ‘Carolingian moment’
4 Lighting, lords and peasants in post-Carolingian Europe
5 Lights and social formation in the central Middle Ages
6 Lights in the later Middle Ages: from devotion to destruction
Conclusions
Index

Informations pratiques :

Paul Fouracre, Eternal light and earthly concerns. Belief and the shaping of medieval society, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2021. 248 p. ISBN : 978-1-7849-9301-6. Prix: GBP : 80,00.

Source : Manchester University Press

Jean Wauquelin, compilant une vie en latin et « un livret rimet en rommant », met en prose la vie de Gérard de Roussillon, premier duc de Bourgogne et fondateur de Vézelay ; mêlant éléments épiques et hagiographiques, il retrace son cheminement de héros dominé par l’orgueil vers la stature de saint.

Table des matières : ici

Informations pratiques :

Jean Wauquelin, Gerart de Roussillon, éd. Marie-Claude de Crécy, Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2021 (Textes littéraires du Moyen Âge, n° 58). 683 p. ISBN : 978-2-406-10122-2. Prix : 49 euros.

Source : Classiques Garnier

Between the sixth and twentieth centuries, the Benedictine Abbey of Monte Cassino (est. 529) experienced a cycle of atrocities which forever transformed its identity. This book examines how such a tumultuous history has been constructed, remembered, and represented from the Middle Ages to the present day. It uses this singular and pivotal case to analyse the historical process of remembering and its impact on modern representations of the past. Exactly how Monte Cassino is remembered is distinctive and diagnostic. The abbey is recognizable today as a beacon of western civilization, culture, and learning precisely because of its ‘destruction tradition’ over fourteen centuries. The Destruction and Recovery of Monte Cassino, 529.1964 asks how the abbey’s fragmented past has been ideologically, politically, and culturally constituted and preserved; how its experience with destruction and suffering . and recovery and rebirth – has become incorporated into a modern narrative of progress and triumph.

Kriston R. Rennie is Dean, Faculty of Indigenous Studies, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Northern British Columbia.

Informations pratiques :

Kriston R. Rennie, The Destruction and Recovery of Monte Cassino, 529-1964, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2021 (Italy in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages). 236 p., 15,5 x 23,5 cm. ISBN : 9789463729130. Prix : 99 euros.

Source : Amsterdam University Press