L'Agenda des Médiévistes

En 1336, Guillaume de Boldensele, frère Prêcheur du couvent de Minden, de retour d’un pèlerinage à Jérusalem, rédige, à la demande du cardinal de Talleyrand, personnage influent de la cour pontificale d’Avignon, un Liber consacré à la Terre Sainte et à l’Égypte. Parmi les nombreux récits de pèlerinage du XIVe siècle qui nous sont parvenus, celui-ci se distingue par l’étendue de la culture dont il témoigne. Culture théologique, ce qui ne surprend pas, mais aussi culture scientifique, jointe à une curiosité d’esprit, qui l’amène à confronter son savoir à l’expérience, devant des phénomènes jugés miraculeux, à construire une image du monde fondée à la fois sur la cartographie et sur ses propres observations.

Dès 1351, Jean le Long, abbé de Saint-Bertin à Saint-Omer, insère ce récit dans la série de traductions qu’il consacre au Proche-Orient et à l’Asie récemment découverte, offrant ainsi un témoignage intéressant sur le nouveau statut du français comme « langue de clergie ». Ainsi c’est à un double titre que l’oeuvre de Boldensele mérite d’être tirée de l’oubli.

Informations pratiques :

Christiane Deluz, Guillaume de Boldensele, sur la Terre Sainte et l’Égypte (1336), Paris, CNRS Éditions, 2018 (Sources d’histoire médiévale). 210 p., 15.5 x 24.0 cm. ISBN : 978-2-271-12053-3. Prix : 50 euros.

Source : CNRS Éditions

Christians have often admired and venerated the martyrs who died for their faith, but for a long time thought that the bodies of martyrs should remain undisturbed in their graves. Initially, the Christian attitude towards the bones of the dead, saint or not, was that of respectful distance. The Beginnings of the Cult of Relics examines how this attitude changed in the mid-fourth century. Robert Wiśniewski investigates how Christians began to believe in the power of relics, first over demons, then over physical diseases and enemies. He considers how the faithful sought to reveal hidden knowledge at the tombs of saints and why they buried the dead close to them. An essential element of this new belief was a strong conviction that the power of relics was transferred in a physical way and so the following chapters study relics as material objects. Wiśniewski analyses how contact with relics operated and how close it was. Did people touch, kiss, or look at the very bones, or just at tombs and reliquaries which contained them? When did the custom of dividing relics begin? Finally, the book deals with discussions and polemics concerning relics, and attempts to find out the strength of the opposition which this new phenomenon had to face, both within and outside Christianity, on its way to become an essential element of medieval religiosity.

Robert Wiśniewski is Associate Professor of Ancient History at the University of Warsaw. His research focuses on religious changes in Late Antiquity, with particular attention to the cult of saints, divination, clergy, and demons.

Table des matières :

Introduction
1: Prehistory and Early Chronology of the Cult of Relics
2: The First Miracles
3: Defenders of Cities
4: Relics and Divination
5: Burials ad Sanctos
6: Finding Relics
7: Touching Relics
8: Displaying and Seeing Relics
9: Dividing Relics
10: Discussions and Theology
11: Eastern, Western, and Local Habits in the Cult of Relics
Conclusions
Bibliography

Informations pratiques :

Robert Wiśniewski, The Beginnings of the Cult of Relics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018. 272 Pages, 234x156mm. ISBN: 9780199675562. Prix : 65 £.

Source : Oxford University Press

Sans doute composé vers 1160, le Roman d’Énéas est une « mise en roman », c’est-à-dire une traduction-adaptation de l’Énéide, parfois très fidèle et parfois remarquablement innovante. L’adaptateur, qui travaillait sans doute sur un manuscrit pourvu de gloses, peut-être pour la cour de Henri II Plantagenêt, roi d’Angleterre, conserve à l’oeuvre de Virgile son statut de récit de fondation, mais l’inscrit dans le monde médiéval tout en y introduisant ce qui est pour lui la quintessence du monde antique, à travers une série d’innovations : de somptueuses descriptions d’œuvres d’art, de brefs récits mythologiques insérés, et un traitement très ovidien des amours de Didon, puis d’Énéas et de Lavine. L’amour de la science hérité des Anciens, sensible à travers une série de digressions savantes, débouche sur l’exposé d’une science de l’amour. L’auteur crée ainsi une oeuvre personnelle et originale où l’Antiquité est revue à travers le prisme du Moyen Âge, dans une volonté concertée d’adapter l’épopée virgilienne à la modernité de son temps. Le manuscrit A, qui est ici entièrement réédité et traduit, a conservé la forme la plus ancienne de cette adaptation.

Informations pratiques :

Le Roman d’Énéas. Édition bilingue. Édition et traduction du manuscrit A, présentation et notes par Wilfrid Besnardeau et Francine Mora-Lebrun, Paris, Honoré Champion, 2018 (Classiques du Moyen Âge). 880 p., 12,5 X 19 cm. ISBN : 9782745349163. Prix : 29 euros.

Source : Honoré Champion

Burning Bodies interrogates the ideas that the authors of historical and theological texts in the medieval West associated with the burning alive of Christian heretics. Michael Barbezat traces these instances from the eleventh century until the advent of the internal crusades of the thirteenth century, depicting the exclusionary fires of hell and judicial execution, the purifying fire of post-mortem purgation, and the unifying fire of God’s love that medieval authors used to describe processes of social inclusion and exclusion.

Burning Bodies analyses how the accounts of burning heretics alive referenced, affirmed, and elaborated upon wider discourses of community and eschatology. Descriptions of burning supposed heretics alive were profoundly related to ideas of a redemptive Christian community based upon a divine, unifying love, and medieval understandings of what these burnings could have meant to contemporaries cannot be fully appreciated outside of this discourse of communal love. For them, human communities were bodies on fire. Medieval theologians and academics often described the corporate identity of the Christian world as a body joined together by the love of God. This love was like a fire, melting individuals together into one whole. Those who did not spiritually burn with God’s love were destined to burn literally in the fires of Hell or Purgatory, and the fires of execution were often described as an earthly extension of these fires. Through this analysis, Barbezat demonstrates how presentations of heresy, and to some extent actual responses to perceived heretics, were shaped by long-standing images of biblical commentary and exegesis. He finds that this imagery is more than a literary curiosity; it is, in fact, a formative historical agent.

Table des matières :

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Burning Bodies and Medieval Human Communal Identity
1. Our God Is Like a Consuming Fire: Burning Bodies and Christian Community
2. Fields and Bodies: Toleration and Threat in a Shared Space
3. The Beginning at Orleans in 1022: Heretics and Hellfire
4. Likeness in Difference: Three Burnings in the Twelfth-Century Rhineland
5. Like Rejoices in Like: Recognition and Differentiation in Descriptions of Heresy
6. Witches and Orgiastic Rituals: Heresy, Sex, and Reading in the Late Twelfth and Early Thirteenth Centuries
7. Leaping from the Flames: Love, Redemption, and Holy War in the Albigensian Crusade
Conclusion: The Uses of Exclusion and Fear for a Community of Love
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Informations pratiques :

Michael D. Barbezat, Burning Bodies. Communities, Eschatology, and the Punishment of Heresy in the Middle Ages, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2018. 276 p., 12 ill. ISBN : 978-1-5017-1680-5. Prix : 55 $.

Source : Cornell University Press

The book Relics @ the Lab, an Analytical Approach to the Study of Relics includes a series of studies presented at the first international workshop Relics @ the Lab organized by the Royal Institute of Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA) in Brussels, Belgium (27-28 October 2016). The papers cover a large variety of themes as well as analytical methods. Some papers focus on the primary relics while others deal with the nature and origin of secondary as well as tertiary relics. The first group of papers emphases on the archaeological authenticity of the relics, the second group elucidate the use, additions and manipulations of the relics through the ages.

The applied analytical techniques are very divers. Radiocarbon and physical anthropology are the main tools to study the primary relics, while dye analysis, imaging techniques, textile analysis and dendrochronology are used to study the secondary and tertiary relics. Sometimes unexpected techniques, like the analysis of writing ink or the determination of plants and excrements, complete the wide range of analytical methods used to understand the origin, nature and context of the relics.

Academics as well as professionals working in archaeology, art history, museum labs and conservation sciences will find this an invaluable reference source.

Informations pratiques :

M. Van Strydonck, J. Reyniers et F. Van Cleven (éd.), Relics @ the Lab. An Analytical Approach to the Study of Relics, Louvain, Peeters Publishers, 2018 (Interdisciplinary Studies in Ancient Culture and Religion, 20). Pages: VI-353 p. ISBN: 978-90-429-3667-6. Price: 78 EURO

Source : Peeters Publishers

This volume provides a record of the response, by eight expert scholars in the field of medieval monastic studies, to the question « To what extent did abbots and abbesses contribute as a `human resource’ to the development of reformed monastic communities in the ninth- to twelfth-century west? » Covering a broad geographical area, papers consider one or several of three key points of interest: the direct contribution of abbots and abbesses to the shaping of reformed realities; their influence over future modes of leadership; and the way in which later generations of monastics relied upon the memory of a leader’s life and achievements to project current realities onto a legitimizing past.

Steven Vanderputten is a full professor in the History of the Early and High Middle Ages at Ghent University (Belgium). His research is mainly concerned with the social and cultural development of monastic groups in the ninth to twelfth centuries, including such subjects as leadership, identity formation, and reform.

Table des matières :

Steven VANDERPUTTEN, Introduction

Michèle GAILLARD, Abbés et abbesses comme ressources dans les réformes monastiques en Haute-Lotharingie du début du neuvième siècle au milieu du dixième siècle
Katy CUBITT, Abbots as a Human Resource in Benedictine Reform England
Jirki THIBAUT, Intermediary Leadership. The Agency of Abbesses in Ottonian Saxony
Nicolangelo D’ACUNTO, Abbots as Human Resources in Italy During the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries
Carlos REGLERO, Founders and Reformers. Abbots in the Kingdoms of Leon and Navarre, Ninth to Twelfth Centuries
Ben POHL, What Sort of Man Should the Abbot Be? Three Voices from the Norman Abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel
Johan BELAEN, The Role of Abbots in the Coordination of Regional Benedictine Monasticism (c. 1130 – c. 1215). New Perspectives and Questions
Gert MELVILLE, The Abbot of Cluny at the Turning Point from the Charismatic- Traditional to Legal Authority. An Analysis referring to Max Weber’s Model

Informations pratiques :

Steven Vanderputten (Ed.), Abbots and Abbesses as a Human Resource in the Ninth- to Twelfth-Century West, LIT Verlag, 2018 (Vita regularis – Ordnungen und Deutungen religiosen Lebens im Mittelalter. Abhandlungen, 74). 184 S., 29.90 EUR, 29.90 CHF, br., ISBN 978-3-643-91070-7.

Source : LIT Verlag