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In the first half of the thirteenth century, an extraordinary transfer of relics took place in the Kingdom of France: the item transferred was no less than Christ's crown of thorns. All possible means were deployed to enhance the magnificence of the event and advertise the grandeur of this object, which was to become a status symbol for the monarchy and for Paris. In order to properly celebrate such a holy acquisition, two liturgical offices were drafted: two ad hoc texts which can be read as the theological and political manifesto of the acquisition. Indeed they echo a campaign extolling the crown of thorns to better extol France and its monarchy. In the words of the liturgical text, the king received the crown of thorns through "divine election": from then on, the relic's symbolic and eschatological potential was to feed on the perfect correspondence between the royal nature of its new owner, Louis IX and the royal nature of the relic.

Gautier de Coinci was a Benedictine monk whose edifying texts use all the devices available to bring out spiritual values. Vernacular poetry is the most appropriate instrument to convey divine resonances. His love of beauty reflects a fiery ideal imbued with great humility. His very being, which is at one with the divine, becomes a channel for holy energies and the foundation of a form of expression that is eternal. His writing leads to the Word which is action. Its efficiency makes it possible to achieve what is the essence of truth. Poetry is thus not an end in itself. The right word, assonance, and stylistic imagery are no ornamentation but acts of contemplation. Poetry is an elixir of life, whose power lies in the immediacy of resemblance.

St. MUND, Constitution and diffusion of Western knowledge about the « Russian » world in the Middle Ages (end of the 10th-middle of the 15th centuries) (Part 2). This article is a synthesis of the knowledge about « Russian » culture in Western Europe between the end of the 10th century (when the Kievan Russia converted to christianity and its sovereigns established relationships with other Christian kings) and the middle of the 15th century (just before the Moscovite Russia, which had succeeded Kievan Rus', joined the political and economic Western sphere). It presents a systematic survey of all Western European mediaeval sources about Russia over this long period. These are chronicles, sagas, encyclopaedias, travel narratives, maps, or chivalric literature. These sources are analysed according to a typological approach, i.e. focusing on the authors, their origin and educational background, on the characteristics of the texts and on the information they provide about Russia. This typological approach shows that an image of Russia emerged in medieval Western Europe, however partial and fragmentary it may have been. Not until the late 15th and the early 16th century was Russia really discovered by Western European diplomats and merchants.

"From the way allegorical writing functions, and particularly from the interactions between the two poles of creation and reading, we can deduce a given relationship with the text as a place in which the subject can unfold. The present paper approaches the issue by an analysis of the means of interpretation in the Ovide Moralis? in verse (early fourteenth century): It places the text in the allegorical tradition, brings out the active force exerted by fiction on its audience, and (in the wake of M. R. Jung's studies) stresses the significance of metaphor in the translation of pagan myth into Christian parable. In harmony with biblical uses of the imaginary, metaphors facilitate a shift from ancient to Christian tradition. Ovide Moralis? was written by a preacher with a wide knowledge of doctrine; as such, it represents a rich starting point from which to explore the significance of a reader's profile in interpreting a text (Wolfgang Iser's theory)."

The Pope's increasing authority in the middle of the eleventh century led to a change in the relative status of the liturgical feasts celebrated in various European dioceses. From the second half of the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, there was disagreement between those who, according to Roman custom, considered that the celebration of the Whitsun octave should prevail and those who argued for the celebration of the Trinity Sunday octave. In order to give each of these feasts its proper solemnity, some dioceses in the Holy Empire swapped Trinity Sunday with the Sunday of its octave. The Li?ge diocese was one of these. Such a variation, which often went unnoticed, was a frequent source of uncertainty about dates, notably the original date of Corpus Christi.