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Romance philology and university reform at the end of the 19th Century : the role of the Collège de France The new school of Romance Philology, which asserted itself from the 1870s, centering around Gaston Paris and Paul Meyer, had a not insubstantial role in the debate on the reform of education ; at the beginning of the Third Republic, there was a tendency to replace classical heritage (the predominance of Latin and rhetoric) with a modern culture, adapted to the new requirements of colonial expansion and the emergence of national rivalries in Europe. This article first deals with the institutionalization of religious studies with the creation of a Chair at the Collège de France, then presents the historical and ideological context for these reforms, stressing the founding principles of republican education ; it then underlines the role of romance specialists in the reform of higher education, particularly through the contributions of Gaston Paris and Michel Bréal, who were advocates of a humanistic pedagogical project. The conclusion briefly touches on the new challenges of the early 21st Century.

The written and the spoken word : a survey of the literary fate of Georges Duby's lectures at the Collège de France from the evidence of manuscripts preserved at the IMEC From 1971 to 1992, the lectures Georges Duby gave at the Collège de France were often the raw material for his forthcoming books. They were so thematically, as the attempt to demonstrate here is made by analyzing the dynamics of what the historian called the “transmission” between teaching and writing. But they were also materially so, in terms of the manuscripts themselves, the first survey of which is provided here, based on a search through the material kept in the IMEC. There are many transcripts of lectures, annotated by Duby, demonstrating that he wrote literally over what he had said, thus saving himself from having to start from a blank page. But the discovery of the index cards he used when he lectured, already heavily written over themselves, reveals a very singular interplay between the written and the spoken word. Some elements of textual DNA in the various states of his drafts shed light on the stylistic framework and, beyond that, on the historical operation itself – from the initial written note on the documents to the creation of an arborescent plan, as can be seen in a few examples of the early drafts of Guillaume le Maréchal.

An unknown Anglo-Norman manuscript in the Aberystwyth Library : The Devil's Charter At the end of a ms. of the Historia regum Britanniae (Brogyntyn I. 7) in the Aberystwyth National Library of Wales a violent attack against the rich, written by a different hand and called La Chartre au diable, or “The Devil's Charter”, has been discovered. The text of this codex is not mentioned in the catalogue of Anglo-Norman literature. After examining its content, one finds that there are other manuscripts of this text and that it is, in fact, an extract from Pierre de Peckham's Lumere as Lais, a work completed in Oxford in 1267. The Aberystwyth codex seems to be from the 14th century to judge from its writing and language. P. Ménard's article provides a version of this strange text, written as if spoken by the Devil, with a translation, a glossary, a linguistic study, notes and a commentary. This document of 208 verses is a forceful expression of the rights of the poor over the property of the rich. The writer does not spare the powerful and speaks acrimoniously of them. It is possible to wonder whether Pierre de Peckham, an ecclesiastic about whom little is known, had not himself been wronged in a matter of church property where he had his prebend.

The relationship between pay and working hours in medieval industry. The definition and measurement of working hours are a recurrent problem in 14th and 15th Century societies. In line with classical research on the subject, this article examines various situations in which there is a definition of working hours, either relative to workers' pay, or in the perspective of the organization of production, or relating to the disciplining of employees. Comparing these different cases shows that the classic opposition between hourly wages and piece rate cannot be the only way to characterize employment situations and also that the problem of defining working hours is the source of the spread of pay relationships and occurs at every stage of their development. The analysis highlights the plasticity of the relationship between employer and employee and the multiplicity of possible definitions of working hours. It also shows that it was over this issue that the conflicts opposing the one against the other crystallized from the early 14th Century. It is therefore a good observation post from which to understand the birth of an industrial sector in medieval society.

The romance of crossed narratives : the theft of time in the Suite du Merlin More than any other author of the Lancelot-Graal, the author of the Suite found himself at a crossroads of narratives. The writing of this text reflects a desire to put in the last piece of a puzzle and then discovering that this indispensable piece did not fit. Indeed, Merlin and Lancelot were drafted without any thought of the assembly that would one day unite them and the first of these texts plans events that the second either ignores or contradicts. Furthermore, there is not enough time between these two works for a connection to exist. Despite this, the author borrows characters from Merlin and the circumstances that put them in conflict with each other from Lancelot. Thus he gains a virtual period of time, a temporal fault in which he can unfold his narrative. But he then develops his work for its own sake and endangers the “continuation” function inherent in the Suite. The flight into the future of the diegesis is suspended in extremis, but not before irredeemable harm has been done to the cycle's coherence.