Contenu du sommaire

The personnel of Hittite temples are very large: from the food providers to the clergy, including the administrators, they constitute a microcosm which is almost self-sufficient. But to what extent are women represented in these various occupations?

The majority of the Berbers of Jebel Nafûsa were Christian when they overwhelmingly adopted the Ibadi doctrine at the end of the first half of the eighth century. This region still contains numerous mosques which bear names with Christian connotations, referring to the apostles or evidently derived from the Latin ecclesia. The Ibadi sources lead us to believe that they are Byzantine churches transformed into mosques. However, if the Christian origin of the building obviously appears in one of the examples visited, most of the other mosques have without a doubt no link with old churches. Their names only recall the memory of the Christian past of the region.

From the 12th century until the Council of Trent, local churches and regular orders determined their own liturgical uses with ever greater precision. They used ordinals and breviaries, which synthesized the prescriptions concerning the divine service, to promulgate, record and spread these continually evolving cultual customs. These books may be considered as the true legal codes of their uses, more than as simply the collections of synodal or capitular statutes. As a result of the Catholic Reformation and the foundation of the Roman Congregation of Rites in 1588, local churches, particularly cathedral chapters, were less and less entitled to their own liturgical rules.

This paper examines the contradictory reception of one figure, Marie des Vallées (1590-1656), a Norman mystic also known as “the saint of Coutances”. Though Saint Jean Eudes recognized her as a true mystic, she, nevertheless, aroused general suspicion, becoming the subject of trials and lampoons during her lifetime as well as posthumously. Her case throws light upon the broader reception of mystical figures during the second half of the 17th century and shows how fundamentally equivocal they are. After a study of the polemic surrounding Marie des Vallées, this article focuses on how Father Eudes attempted to legitimate Marie as a particular type of saintly mystic. It also draws attention the ways in which her opponents used her to put mysticism at large on trial.

An expert on Medieval Arabic literature, who comes from the German philological tradition, makes an important contribution to the debate about the role of Islam in our contemporary world. He criticizes the present “Islamization of Islam”, that is, reducing Islam to exclusively religious meanings. In opposition to the Modern West, characterized by its requirement for precision, Islam belongs to societies that show a higher degree of “tolerance for ambiguity”. From this perspective, contemporary Islamic fundamentalism could be paradoxically perceived as a manifestation of Modernity. The author reviews the way in which ambiguity in the Koranic text, in the Tradition and in gender relations is handled and “domesticated” within Islamic classical culture.