Contenu du sommaire

Legend or History ? The Assassins in Ambroise's Estoire de guerre sainte and in the Chronique d'Ernoul et de Bernard le Trésorier The legend of the Assassins held fascination throughout the Middle Ages. Originally started by Arab lampoonists to denounce the heretical sect of the Ishmaelites, it was fed by the fanciful vision of European writers who added their own legends. Ambroise, in the Estoire de la guerre sainte, which tells the story of the Third Crusade from an English perspective, and Ernoul in the Chronique d'Ernoul et de Bernard le Trésorier in the opposite camp come face to face with this legend on the death of Conrad of Montferrat, titular King of Jerusalem, from the blows of two followers of the sect led by the Old Man of the Mountain. One writer reports the incident stressing its tragic dimension, while adding a succinct explanatory passage on the customs of the Assassins ; the other only provides the details of the murder. This divergence in methodology, which raises the question of procedure in the writing of history and its political and religious agenda, makes it possible to define two different historians. It also reveals an imaginary Other created by an image of the self.

Collective Identity and Memory of the “Ricardian” Reforms in Benedictine Historiography in Lower-Lotharingia and in North-Eastern France (XIe–XIIe Centuries). This article discusses the integration of the memory of the “ricardian” reforms into the social memory of the Benedictine communities in Lower Lotharingia and in North-Eastern France. Whereas writers close to the facts still express a qualified or even disinterested view of the reforms, the actuality of the fact of the reforms, beginning at the end of the XIe Century, had a profound influence on the way the historiography of the period represented the preceding “wave” of reforms. This development should be taken into consideration in any study of monastic life in the Central Middle Ages, if only to understand the impact of these writers on our knowledge of the concrete consequences of the reforms.

When the Great Turk was called L'Amorat Baquin The way the sultan was formerly appointed is a modest, but curious document, on the judgment which the French public opinion carried on the growing power of the Ottoman empire. The most former generic naming of the sultan could indeed have been L'Amorat Baquin. We meet it in the last years of the XIVe century (Froissart's chronicles, Jean Petit's poems etc.). It is sometimes associated with a caricatural representation of the sultan (a jester, a swaggerer) and this image is imperative a century later. We meet another naming : L'Amorat Bahy. Both expressions disappear in front of Le Grand Turc or Le Turc. In the second half of the XVIe century, we do not find any more L'Amorat Baquin than at the antiquarians (Estienne, Pasquier, Brantôme). We propose an etymology. In a appendix, we examine the date and the manuscripts of Le Chevalier des dames, one of the texts where the expression is attested.

The Parodic Transposition of the Oath Motif in Version A of Prise d'Orange Parodic displacement in a medieval work occurs in three directions : vertically : from top to bottom (burlesque), from bottom to top (the heroi-comical) and horizontally – between two literary spaces that exist at the same level in the hierarchy of genres (epico-courtly transposition). The latter is studied based on the treatment of the epic motif of the oath in version A of Prise d'Orange. The stable nature of the motif due to the fixed choice of formulae that constitute it (its formal characteristic), on the one hand, and its flexibility or its ability to be modified (its content), on the other, insure that the motif operates by enabling it to be changed in parodic ways. Parody works not only on the inter-textual level (from an epic tone to a courtly tone), but also within the poem itself : from one manifestation of the motif to another, to the extent that each manifestation becomes a parodic re-writing of the previous one.

Marco Polo, Merchant or Reporter ? Marco Polo's travels, leaving Venice in 1269 and returning in 1295, after spending some seventeen years with the Great Kublai Khan, accompanying his father and his uncle, theoretically to deliver the Pope's response to a message from the Khan, led to the drafting of a book – Le Devisement du monde (Description of the World or The Travels of Marco Polo) – the term Devisement should be understood as meaning description. With the help of the Pisan Rustichello, the author tells the story of his travels to and from Venice, as well as of his stay and tribulations within the Mongol Empire. He provides first rate information on the provinces of this Asian empire. Such a book led to a variety of judgements. The author only gathered his notes and their composition during his captivity in Genoa, where he met another prisoner, Rustichello, who transformed his book into a report on his adventures during his travels as well as on his time in the Mongol Empire under Kublai Khan.

Clarification and Annotation of an Enigmatic Passage in Guillaume de Machaut's Voir Dit Verses 2038–2043 of Guillaume de Machaut's Voir Dit (in P. Imbs' edition) complete the portrait of Toute Belle with a disconcerting “object” : an herminette (small ermine), to which is attached a little chain and a magnificent ring. This article aims to show that this is not the fur of a small dead ermine, but a small ermine that is very much alive, on a leash (the little chain) and with a collar (the ring), Toute Belle's pet animal. This is her double. Machaut makes this clear by establishing a physical proximity between the two (the lady holds the small ermine), which he reinforces with onomastic proximity : Toute Belle is an anagram of ou Bellette (“or Weasel”). The zoological characteristics of weasels and stoats (who change their “dress” in winter), the myths that went around about them, linked to the lady's own characteristics and the grievances done to her, clarify her love affair with the Poet and encourage us to look on her less severely and more courteously.