Contenu du sommaire

If Louis IX freed hundreds of serfs, it was not out of charity but, as shown by Marc Bloch, because of the difficulties faced by his administration to raise the characteristic taxes of servitude. Through a collection of testimonies recorded against the châtelain of Laon in 1248, during Louis IX extensive “restitution investigations”, the paper attempts to shed light on the problems faced by royal officers to collect the mortmain in Picardy where serfs were numerous. Facing the royal legislation, servile elite knew how to play with local custom and with their puzzling condition according to their interests, when they did not invent complex strategies in order to avoid taxation and to preserve their sometimes substantial assets. This article intends to participate in the re-evaluation of the servile condition while focusing on the agency of those who were considered as dominated by excellence: the medieval serfs.

Published in 1719 as an authentic travel account, Robinson Crusoé became in the early nineteenth century a classic of children's literature. Through the editorial story of the novel and the adaptations that occurred in the second half of the eighteenth century, this article would like to examine the process by which a book became a classic, from an extreme case, that of a contemporary novel. This is to show how the narrative, iconographic and material choices made by the authors and their publishers crossed the social trajectories of the authors and the contemporary debates on production for youth and language teaching.

This study is based upon a survey conducted with French historians currently teaching in universities and university-based research centers and whose research papers (doctoral thesis and habilitations) cover at least one of the important breaks which define the different periods on which historians usually work upon (476, 1492, 1789-1815). This academic article is trying to assess the importance and the role of traditional periodization over research methodologies and teaching, and to evaluate how it is received and perceived by teachers-researchers. We also tried to explain the strength and the origins of traditional periodization before briefly providing an international perspective. It appears that historical periodization has had a great influence due to an institutionalization which took place early, in a national context, with a consensus approach. This can explain its durability compared to the other ways of organizations that could exist among historical studies, even the most modern ones that are put forward, such as the notion of “cultural areas”. This influence does not prevent a certain flexibility which gives the possibility to different accommodation at individual scale. This real institution of historical periodization, in the sociological sense of the term, is not specific to France; though it is a national context particularly adapted to its development.

The definition of History as “trace-based knowledge” is one of the most deeply-rooted axioms in historians' representations, whatever their epistemology stance. This paper deals first with the genealogy of this axiom, and shows that the use of the word “trace” as knowledge medium appeared exactly with the emergence of historical science, from the mid-18th century onwards (even though the concept was only theorized much later, at the end of the 20th century, as a kind of clue), and that the semiotic value of the “trace” is systematically restricted to the imprint rather than to the track. The paper examines therefore the logical implications of this conception of the “historical trace” as an imprint, which operates for the historian as the mirror image, both epiphanic and mimetic, of a vanished reality, the past – as if History were a mere technology aiming at “resuscitating the past”. The paper eventually addresses the object classically attributed to History – despite the opposition of many historians –, the past, and hypothesizes that it is precisely the unspoken theory of “trace-based knowledge” and the reduction of the trace to an imprint which prevent the historian from going beyond the traditional task of History as a commemoration of the past.

IT tools have been broadly developed in prosopographical studies irrespective of the period in question. The payoffs can be seen in the matter of data storage and data query but these tools also raise the question of the prosopographical practices inherited from the scholar tradition. In particular, a relational database enables us to examine the way to build a prosopography from a new point of view. This examination is all the more needed in the context of Attic prosopography, whilst our corpus of sources is incomplete and based on texts established with difficulty. Neither methodological questions, nor the questioning about the validity of the prosopographical data, on which depend many studies, are new. This methodological questioning is nevertheless renewed when we try to translate the prosopographical logic into the relational databases system.
The first part of this paper is a historiographical analysis of the long tradition of Attic prosopography so as to understand why the methodological discourse remains implicit since the end of the 19th century. It seems that the historians of Ancient Greece intervene less than those of the Roman world in the epistemological debate, even if prosopography was born at the same time, within the scope of Greek and Roman epigraphical studies. This link with epigraphy remains so important that it is difficult to distinguish between the different kinds of prosopography (onomasticon, epigraphical commentary, social enquiry) when we look back to the publications dealing with Hellenistic Athens for example. In these studies, we can see that making prosopography seems to be obvious when you work with Attic inscriptions. This is maybe the reason why the method used to build the personal lexicon is not systematically explained. Notwithstanding, we can find reflections about methodological considerations in several of those publications.
The second part of this article aims to demonstrate that a relational database reveals this implicit discourse. After having explained how a database devoted to Attic prosopography should be structured, I illustrate with a precise example the link between the methodological discourse and this specific data structure. Namely, the recording of data in separate tables can stress a set of arguments usually used to read incomplete names in texts, decipher homonyms and find parents. It would be of great benefit if we decided on the permanent combination of arguments sufficient to accept a prosopographical hypothesis as certain. We must first determine each kind of arguments we are used to taking in consideration, such as «sharing of demotic» or «onomastic network». We also must establish if we have to give them the same value. We must finally decide how many of these arguments should be chosen together in the same rationale.
Details of the example of the family of Charikles and Theodoros of Phalêreus can be found in the annex, where I examine two possible stemmata.