Mediaevalia Groningana New Series – serie

Medieval writers who 'translated' Latin texts into Germanic vernaculars not only transmitted their originals, but, driven by individualistic impulses and cultural conventions, also transformed them. This process of domesticating texts was fundamentally creative and might more accurately be described as 'reconstruction'. The essays in Germanic Texts and Latin Models: Medieval Reconstructions explore the ways in which Latin texts and traditions were reconstructed in Old English, Old Icelandic and Old High German and cover a range of genres: legal texts, genealogies, histories, and poetry. They examine how medieval Germanic authors negotiated the need to transmit their models while at the same time fulfilling their own political, artistic and didactic objectives in the creation of vernacular texts. These new studies demonstrate the variety of ways in which medieval Germanic texts were indebted to their Latin exemplars, while reflecting their new culturally specific circumstances in the complex nexus of Latin learning and Germanic lore.

The leading theme of this collection of essays and studies is the diversity of aspects of medieval communal identity. While the authors were selected for the very diversity of their interests, their final papers do tend to cohere around some recurrent themes. All of the studies in this volume touch upon one or more of the complex issues that lie at the heart of religious identity in the Middle Ages. They do so through concrete study of the very real practices by which medieval Jews, Christians and Muslims could police the perimeters of their spiritual communities. The authors were especially urged to note instances where religious identity was shaped without reference to dogmas, creeds, or sacred law. In no case are any of these papers satisfied with normative, legal definitions of Jew, Christian, or Muslim in medieval times. Sometimes small and subtle, sometimes explicit, dire, and violent, the techniques that emerge from these studies testify to the diversity of strategies of medieval communal identity over space and their changes over time.

This volume contains twelve studies, all dealing with aspects of the literature and culture of Scotland during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Most of these contributions began life as papers delivered at an international conference on that subject, held at Rolduc Abbey, The Netherlands, in 2002. Much new light is shed on canonical Middle Scots writers: Alastair Fowler and David Parkinson, both on Gavin Douglas; David Moses on Robert Henryson; Rubén Valdés Miyares on William Dunbar. The essay by Rod Lyall, on the anonymous «Three Prestis of Peblis, and that of Eleanor Commander, on the «Originale Chronicle» by Andrew Wyntoun, both illuminate unperceived aspects of well-known fifteenth-century texts. Both Janet Hadley Williams and Alan Swanson significantly advance our knowledge of the poet, Sir David Lyndsay. Women's contribution to culture is the subject of the essays by Marguérite Corporaal (on poetry by Queen Mary Stewart and by Mary Beaton) and of Marie-Claude Tucker (on the calligrapher Esther Inglis). In the area of Scottish Gaelic literature and culture, William Gillies explores the connections between a prose tale and poem on the topic of the land of the Little People. In the final study, Jamie Reid-Baxter contextualises and expounds a hitherto unknown Renaissance sonnet sequence, «The Nyne Muses», by John Dykes. In each of the contributions in this volume rhetoric and reality loom large; royalty, the third term of the title, is the ever-present final parameter of culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Dans la période qui va du règne de Philippe IV le Bel (1285-1314) à celui de Louis XIII (1610-1643) la royauté française se transforme d'une monarchie aux accents «seigneuriaux» en une monarchie presque souveraine où tous les habitants deviennent les sujets de «Sa Majesté», titre aux accents romains officialisé sous Henri II. Le parcours qui mène vers cette sujétion se trouve cependant être balisé de sentiments. Tant que le pouvoir royal n'est pas encore bien en selle, il exploite pleinement le thème de l'affection: le roi est le pater patriae ou le «père» qui aime ses sujets et qui les consulte volontiers dans les assemblées de notables et dans des États, provinciaux, régionaux ou généraux. L'affection atteint son apogée dans l'assemblée de notables de 1506 où les députés confèrent à Louis XII le titre de «père du peuple», qualification qui est ressassée à l'infini par la machine propagandiste: le roi de France est le «père» de ses sujets.L'étiquette «père du peuple» ne sert cependant qu'à masquer des velléités centralisatrices et autoritaires, car le «père» de la bienheureuse famille française se souvient du statut du père dans l'Ancien Testament et de celui du pater familias de l'Empire romain. Ces pères-là voulaient être obéis.L'issue est prévisible. Dès que le principe de la souveraineté du roi s'est imposé, les rois de France abandonnent le thème de la paternité affective qui leur a rendu de si bons services et, sauf rare exception, ils refusent d'inviter encore leurs sujets bien-aimés à venir discuter de problèmes touchant «le roi et le royaume». La voix du peuple a beau être la voix de Dieu, toujours est-il que les assemblées de notables et, à fortiori, les États généraux sont des obstacles incommodes et incontrôlables. Cela déplaît foncièrement au roi de France qui règne par la grâce de Dieu et qui n'a des comptes à rendre qu'à Lui. Tous les habitants du royaume - et peu importe leur statut - deviennent des sujets du roi-«père». Les États généraux de 1614-15 sont les derniers. Il y a encore deux assemblées de notables (en 1617 et 1626), mais elles ne changent pas la donne: la voix du peuple est étouffée. Ce n'est qu'en 1789 qu'elle se fait entendre de nouveau.

Medieval cultures to the north and west of the Alps gained their initial understanding of visual spatialization from the Ancient world, but developed their own ways of managing primary and secondary space on any surface where text and/or art interact. The eleven essays of this volume span the period from early insular manuscripts through to later medieval books or artefacts, and examine specific strategies in scribal layout or prescribed authorial design. These vary in their sophistication from the naïve and inadvertent to the self-conscious and at times parodic intentional, allowing us a fascinating insight into the many different ways in which main and marginal space on the page could be employed by medieval imaginations.

Throughout the early Middle Ages, education and learning in Western Europe underwent a substantial development, from Italy across the Alps, from Latin to the vernacular and from secular to (although not exclusively) religious. With Latin as its prime medium, developments in education and learning were genuinely international and allowed for a steady exchange of teachers and texts across borders and institutions. Members of the fifth-century Gallo-Roman senatorial classes ¿ such as Eucherius of Lyons and Cassiodorus ¿ became bishops, abbots or founders of monasteries, and thereby catalysts in the transformation from secular to religious education. Then as now intellectuals travelled, taking both their learning and their books with them: Theodore of Tarsus travelled from the extreme end of the Mediterranean to Italy and across the Alps; John Scottus Eriugena migrated from Ireland to France; Boniface from England to Germany; while Abbo later made a journey from Fleury to Abingdon and back ¿ to name only a few examples. With the mobility of intellectuals comes the movement of texts and books: ranging from Pliny's Historia naturalis and Isidore's Etymologiae or the works of Bede to many of the smaller texts and fragments which have been the subject of study in the ¿Storehouses' project. Although almost all of the precise details of classroom practice in the early Middle Ages remain hidden to the modern eye, and identifiable students' copy books or note-pads are rare, some of the texts and books that have survived still recall the monastic auditorium or schola because of their potential use in the classroom or in view of the texts found in these books. Often these texts and manuscripts testify to the international developments outlined above and to the international nature of the world of early medieval learning. The articles in this second volume of ¿Storehouses of Wholesome Learning' emanate from the second workshop in the project, this time held at Leiden in June 2005. They focus on illuminating the multifaceted practice of learning by laying bare the exchanges of scholarship between the British Isles and the continent. From the Development of the Foetus, found in Bremmer's contribution, to the Fifteen Signs of Doomsday, the encyclopaedic knowledge that was disseminated all over Western Europe in written texts and, in all likelihood, through oral transmission, featured strongly in the practice of early medieval learning. The subject of that learning was nothing less than life itself, both in the physical and in the spiritual sense of the word.

En marge de la production littéraire des troubadours des 12ème et 13ème siècles on trouve un certain nombre de lettres d'amour en vers. Dans ces épîtres amoureuses, mieux connues sous le terme de saluts, l'amant implore la grâce de sa dame selon les préceptes de la littérature courtoise de l'époque. Thématiquement proches du genre lyrique majeur de la canso, les saluts se distinguent toutefois de celle-ci par l'emploi de la forme non-lyrique des genres didactiques et narratifs, non sans conférer une nouvelle unité à ce mélange remarquable en observant les règles dictées par les manuels épistolaires contemporains. En même temps, c'est ce caractère hybride qui fait du salut un genre mal défini et peu connu. Cette étude propose une réévaluation de ce genre mineur de la lyrique troubadouresque. En partant des diverses études dont le salut a fait l'objet jusqu'à maintenant, elle examine d'abord l'ensemble des poésies désignées par ce terme afin d'offrir une délimitation pratique du corpus. L'analyse détaillée de l'un des saluts du 'maître' du genre, le troubadour Arnaud de Mareuil, permet ensuite de mieux cerner sa technique poétique. La spécificité du discours amoureux du salut ressort d'un examen approfondi de son caractère épistolaire, qui, par le dialogue implicite avec la dame qu'il entraîne, fait éclater la construction lyrique traditionnelle en ouvrant la voie vers les genres narratifs. Ce double statut générique lyrico-narratif du salut est enfin illustré par un survol de l'emploi de la désignation salutz, par un examen succinct de sa tradition manuscrite et par un inventaire des traces que le genre a laissées dans les textes contemporains.Le salut apparaît ainsi comme un genre original, qui, à travers ses caratéristiques spécifiques, jette un pont entre le lyrique et le narratif. Ce faisant, il constitue un moment particulier dans l'évolution de la littérature occitane médiévale.