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While the School of Savigny claims that prud'hommes and bonnes gens were well- defined legal categories, the French school maintains that they were merely notable people in their communities. Now, late medieval Walloon and Flemish sources make it possible to establish that prud'hommes were first and foremost free men who could freely commit themselves to an oath of allegiance by which they vowed to devote themselves to truth and loyalty. However, not all free men who had sworn this oath were de facto prud'hommes, the label only applied to those who were known for their moral valour and for always keeping their word, and were consequently elected by their peers to public charges, which involved repeating their oath. Medieval sources record the various testimonies involved in this very Latin election to public charges.

Latin models such as Dudon de Saint-Quentin and Guillaume de Jumièges largely inspired Benoît de Sainte-Maure as he fulfilled King Henry II Plantagenêt's request to write a history of the dukes of Normandy. Yet his perspective was different. Besides reporting military deeds and conquests, Benoît also allowed himself religious and political comments. He showed how the Norman dukes, who were said to be Henry II's ancestors and descended from the Danes, themselves allegedly descendents of the Trojans, built the foundations of a harmonious civilisation as they combined their military role and their worldly power under the sway of the Roman Church. Their patria, Troy and the splendid civilisation Benoît had conjured up in his Roman de Troie, might have disappeared, but the history of the Danes who became Dukes of Normandy and Kings of England was an ongoing affair. Reaching its high point under Henry II, as Benoît claimed, it illustrates how they could retrieve and develop « Trojan» virtues such as how to guide and rule their people in the light of the Christian faith, and how they founded the Trojan civilisation again, this time in the boundaries of the Western world.

Poppo, abbot of Stavelot-Malmedy died in the Abbey of Marchiennes in Hainaut on January 25, 1048. The scene of the saint's death, in a grandiose description by his hagiographer some ten years later, deserves close examination, as does his funeral, at the threshold of his "rebirth" into eternal life and sainthood (dies natalis). The Vita Popponis follows the rules of the hagiographic genre, in which the monk's death is given prominence.

The present paper is based on the exhaustive study of a collection of fourteenth and fifteenth century literary prose texts (short tales). It aims to reassess the function of the various complex groups of names used to refer to the main characters in the tales. These groups of names (ledit x, ung tel x, nostre x, bon x, and x or x) were first characterized by Jens Rasmussen in his 1958 study as belonging to the curial style. They will be examined here as key factors in constructing a textual reference. A comparative study of these groups as designators in the XV Joyes de Mariage and the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles will highlight the main patterns governing their use.

A close examination of the testaments left by Venetian patricians involved in sea trade and economic business makes it possible for historians to find out about Venetian procedures for legacy at the end of the Middle Ages, and to assess how original they may have been when compared with what was happening in the rest of the Western world. The present paper also looks at the influence a regular practice of business activities had on the patricians' religious thought. Various relatives were mentioned in the course of the deed of testament, as successive circles of kinship are referred to. We can then examine the dynamics of family relationships. Finally, succession modalities show how those merchant patricians related to real estate patrimony and the extent to which they were concerned with business activities.