Contenu du sommaire

Fr. COLLARD, Veneficiis vel maleficiis. Reflections on relations between poisoning and witchcraft in the medieval Western world. Both narrative and legal sources in the medieval Western world provide us with a number of cases combining witchcraft and poisoning. Indeed associating the two has been common practice in the history of witchcraft. The present study aims at assessing to what extent this linking rests on actual criminal practices or on popular representations. It first establishes in which cases and in what ways the two practices converge. The legal and lexical roots of the association and how they intersect in culture and people's perceptions are examined next. Veneficium and maleficium are both connected to the occult, which explains the parallel in the chart tracing their repression in the late Middle Ages. We note, however, that there is a simultaneous attempt at uncoupling the two practices in that « common » poisoning is distinguished from the use of satanic powders mentioned in witchcraft trials. This process of « dis-spelling» criminal poisoning extended into the 17th century.

M.D. LECLERC, Les Dits des oiseaux (Tales of Birds). Among all the medieval bestiaries that got printed, the short piece called Les Dits des oiseaux stands out as a singular work. It is striking first and foremost because of its longevity : two handwritten copies in the 15th century were followed by few printed versions, but it lived on within a rather heterogeneous work known as the ancestor of the almanac, Le Grand Calendrier et Compost des bergers (The Shepherds' Great Calendar and Compost). The present paper examines developments in the composition of the work through its several editions from the 15th to the 18th century, then it compares its contents to the traditional contents of bestiaries and more particularly of volucraries.

B. LIBROVÁ, The fox in the cubiculum taxi: modifications of an exemplum and the symbolism of the badger. The present paper is intended as a contribution to the analysis of the symbolical values of the badger in medieval literature. It examines the modifications that an animal exemplum goes through in various genres. The badger is not conspicuous in literature, yet its significance lies in its relationship with divine symbolism, especially in the story of the lair taken over by the devil-fox. The drama, which fits zoological facts, is treated differently in different genres. Encyclopedias refer to specific zoological facts. Preachers turn it into an exemplum, though innovative features are not necessarily excluded. In a French school book and in Petite Philosophie the badger's appearance boils down to a few brief phrases, to images that seem to go back to empirical observation. Another aspect of the same reality appears through the patterns formed by characters in Roman de Renart. The confusion with the marmot that derived from a misreading of Pliny and from paronymic habits shows how easily the symbolic significance attached to an animal can be shifted to another. The indeterminacy of the badger's senefiances is confirmed by the negative connotations attached to it outside this exemplum, which in turn shed light on other aspects typical of the way it was perceived through history.

Fr. RELAÑO, Cosmographia Arithmetica: the world, its parts, and medieval numerology Since Ancient times people everywhere have always been fascinated with numbers and their combinations. The present essay starts with the Western world in the Middle Ages and examines the influence numerology exerted on cosmography. It then focuses on the adaptation and transformation that medieval numerology underwent as a result of the changing of geographical perception carried out during the Renaissance. This resulted in a gradual erosion of the prescriptive value of its analogical principles in the representation of the world on paper.