Contenu du sommaire

Market prices, the grain market and credit at the beginning of the 13th Century : considering a document from Rouen In 1209, a dispute over a manor opposed the Abbey of Saint-Amand de Rouen and the Priory of Bonne-Nouvelle. In a bid to resolve this, the two parties reached an agreement by which the Abbey gave up its rights to the manor and traded them for an annual allowance of grain. Reproduced in the form of a handwritten contract with indisputable corroborating marks, the establishment of an allowance, which is representative of 13th Century contracts at the diplomatic level, seems less conventional when one considers the clauses specifying how the annual payment is to be made. It implicitly highlights practices and a knowledge of the rules of the market, upon which, at the same time, scholarly thinkers rely for proposing a moral assessment of the economy, which will define the framework of economic practice until the end of the Middle Ages.

The games of amorous casuistry in some of the exchanges in the prose Lancelot and Tristan The influence of amorously casuistic debate, fashionable in medieval aristocratic society, and which has already been substantially noted in Romanesque themes and motifs, probably also extended to certain conversational microstructures. In some exchanges in the prose Lancelot and Tristan, it is noticeable that the structure of the exchanges seems to be influenced by these playful models. This affects revelatory exchanges by bringing distance to what is being said. By making them “playful”, the characters are free to reveal, under the guise of lightheartedness, truths that are hard to express. These romances, which we also know use university or legal forms of interaction as well, thus reveal their ability to integrate all human language situations in their bid for exhaustivity.

The Prince, a civilizing hero What kind of person was the Italian prince at the end of the Middle Ages ? More than someone above his fellow men : he was a hero, whose primary duty was held to be that of denying or of repelling barbarism. He had one essential way of achieving this and his power rested on it : this was war – in the military reality of the times and even more so in its symbolism. This was apparent in rhetoric and iconography, particularly evidenced by the decoration of the palaces. Relying on ancient and medieval models, the Italian prince of the 15th Century positioned himself, when confronted by all these “barbarisms”, as the defender of the civilization that Italy had only recently become aware of incarnating ; this was done within a political perspective, which was in tune with the increase in the phenomenon of “monarchization”.

Pictures of the afterlife : two illuminated manuscripts of the purgatory of Saint Patrick The article is devoted to the study of two iconographic arrangements that accompany the prose rewritings of the legend of the purgatory of St Patrick in two manuscripts in the Arras Municipal Library (302 and 657). It should be recalled that there is very little iconography linked to this legend, which nevertheless has some characteristics that would seem to favor representation : an emphasis on a terrestrial entryway, geographically located in the afterlife, numerous descriptions of locations, a highly individualized hero, etc. Nevertheless, the difficulty in creating an image seems above all to lie in the representation of the transitory nature of purgatory in relation to hell. The study demonstrates that painters represented punishments rather than a particular place and took from the texts an interpellating dimension, following the demonstrative and persuasive reasoning of texts.

Did disputes have a social purpose ? The case of land transfers in Anjou during the 11th Century Most of the disputes known by the “actes de la pratique” of the Central Middle Ages were linked to gifts made to religious establishments, as well as to sales and exchanges. Because they almost always ended in the affirmation of peace, these disputes seem to have contributed to strengthen the links between the participants to these transfers, which, otherwise, would have come apart. The question arises whether analyses, assuming the primacy of the “social” and relegating to the background the relationship between these contemporaries and the law and economic rationality, have not in fact contributed to overshadowing them. The problem posed, and never truly resolved, of “actes” mentioning a transfer of property partly as a gift and partly as a sale, is examined. The idea of property is also studied by showing how the requirement of rationality in the management of estates demanded that precise legal concepts be maintained. This demand explains the preservation of the distinction between a gift and a sale in the 11th Century ; finally, it becomes apparent how the law, economic interest and a sense of religion were combined.