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Rigaut de Barbezieux or the Religion of Love. The article presents a minutely detailed analysis of the idea and the experience of love as represented in the songwriter Rigaut de Barbezieux. The author endeavors to outline the stages of a kind of logical journey. He concludes with the thesis that Rigaut de Barbezieux was the first troubadour to conceive of amorous passion as a form of purely selfless contemplation, excluding even communication between souls. In other words, his historical originality would lie in the fact that, of all troubadours, he was the first to express, clearly and with a remarkable sense of importance, the ideal encompassed in the expression “courtly love” in its simplest and most popular form. The religious allegories encompassed within the comparisons so lavishly developed by the poet harmonize remarkably with this idea of profane love as a kind of pious and moral cult.

A singular way of displaying laws and customs in the Middle Ages. The traille in the Cathedral of Saint Lambert in Liège. A careful examination of texts from the end of the Middle Ages has enabled the identification of a singular way of displaying the law of the City and the country of Liège. Going into its cathedral, the citizen of Liège was able to consult, leafing through it in a little recess carved out of a pillar behind a gate and closed by a grille (the “traille”), the book in which were registered a copy of the statutes and the privileges he enjoyed. The texts compiled in this book, which the “traille” encloses, and which we have largely been able to restore, are a condensation of the liberties and privileges acquired over time by the people from its rulers. Literate men, jurisconsults, experts in customary law or public officials had to hand a kind of code of public law governing the social, political and even the economic life of the country. For over two centuries, perhaps more, the different groups constituting the political community agreed on a ius commune, a municipal and “national” customary law, which ensured social peace. Thus, Liège, well-known for its forward-looking advances in matters of individual liberty, of the control and separation of powers, is also ahead of most foreign cities in the field of legal publicity; the registration of the law is not confined to the clerk's office in sovereign court.

Rumors, propaganda and public opinion during the Civil War (1407-1420) Between 1407 and 1420, the Armagnacs and Burgundians fought a ruthless war, and their men at arms devastated the Île-de-France. Yet, the abominable crimes usually attributed to them (arson, pillage, murder, rape...) are mostly unrecorded. This discrepancy, a major historical problem, can be understood by the spread of rumors and the immoderate use of propaganda. Indeed on both sides it proved essential to manipulate public opinion through manifestos, ballads or sermons, just as it became necessary to keep individuals under observation and control, for every stranger could be a spy or a propagandist. Rumor fed public fears, and one finds village communities taking the initiative and defending themselves against the misdeeds of men at arms. Banditry, far from being the actions of ruffians on the prowl, was in fact presented, in judicial sources, as an act of self-defense.

Mabrien or the progression of a knight of the 15th Century toward the romance. Mabrien is the last part of the written Montauban cycle, dated 1462. This text describes a hero, who could be considered a “hero of closure”. In a cycle that includes the romance form, it can be supposed that this hero must have particular characteristics making him not just “an additional hero”. We will therefore start from the hypothesis that such a character is connected in a number of ways to the origin, to the foundation, which implies being inscribed in the myth: having to “bring the adventures to a close”, the hero of closure is “mythic” in the sense that he has a privileged relationship with the forces of nature, with the society he is remodelling, possibly with the Other-World. Furthermore, in order for this culmination to be legitimate, the hero must be shown to be profoundly integrated into the cycle; and his journey must be one of culmination which cannot simply be measured by the success of his exploits. The hero of closure must have what the others have, even if it means reliving adventures that are identical to those of his predecessors – inscribing him into the cycle, while giving him a post-position justifying his bearing a higher dimension in these adventures – but he must go further and in particular resolve all the tensions generated during the course of the cycle. These different elements of investigation will be discussed in this article.

Wod and wude in medieval English literature or the geography of Madness. Lunatics are not familiar figures in English medieval works. In particular, they hardly play any role in Old English literature. (...) Before the introduction of romance, in the 12th century, the few examples of lunatics are Biblical heroes or those considered as possessed by the Devil (sick people, sinners, or pagans). On the other hand, Lives of Saints present men and women madly in love with God, hermits withdrawn into deserts, and fascinating mystics while in epics madness is associated with anger: infuriated warriors fight on the battlefield. In the 14th and 15th centuries, with romance now a well-established genre, knights are often shown as temporarily unsound. Mental disorder is then a (necessary?) stage in their inner development: deeply bewildered, they separate themselves from society and find refuge in the forest; in romances, the madman is a wild man. Quite different is the urban fool, the court jester, whose (pretended) madness reveals concealed wisdom. The king's fool appeared in medieval works but had his hour of glory, later on, in Elizabethan drama. Lunatics, fools, all those beside themselves, though not totally absent from English medieval texts, remain, throughout the period, in the background.

The dependence relationship between Saint Benedict and his serfs: constraint or protection? In the monastic domain of Fleury-sur-Loire, the relationship between the lord, Saint Benedict, and his serfs is atypical. Basically, this dependence brings with it mainly economic constraints for the dependents, some of whom are pressing for emancipation. But by being placed under the protection of that particular lord, the serfs benefit from a specific defense. Through the narratives of the Miracles of Saint Benedict, the hagiographers of Fleury relate, between the 9th and 12th Centuries, the various kinds of relationships between, and the demands of, the opposing parties, including both every individual's expectations and the development of society as a whole, and demonstrate the complexity of a protection that offered advantages for each of the protagonists within the framework of a demanding relationship, in which every transgression was punished, but equally in which the Saint responded to every prayer.