Contenu du sommaire : Comptes rendus

First attested in 1558 and abolished by Peter the Great in 1697, the Muscovite Palm Sunday ritual has attracted the attention of many scholars. Due to Michael S. Flier's insightful semiotic analysis, the role played by Patriarch Nikon in the refashioning of this ritual is also well known. Nevertheless, a very interesting depiction of the 1667 Palm Sunday ritual still awaits proper analysis. Included by the Metropolitan of Gaza Paisios Ligaridis in his famous and controversial History of the 1666‑1667 Council that deposed Nikon, this depiction of the ritual allows us to understand better the roles ascribed to Nikon's successor, Patriarch Joseph, and to Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich. The aim of this study is to put Ligaridis' description of the 1667 Palm Sunday procession in context and to see how the results fit into the framework of previous researches.

From 1704 to 1714, Fénelon published many texts about jansenist quarrel which tried to persuade the public that jansenism can be identified with the thesis according to which the efficiency of divine grace consists in an attraction of victorious delectation which always denies free will the possibility to resist to it. The present works aims at showing that, after his death, Fénelon has been considered as the main responsible of the change of the conceptual trajectory of the antijansenist quarrel. The consequences of this change have been crucial until the end of the 18th Century and, after the works of Fénelon, the notion of victorious delectation was surely the main point in the discussion between molinists and jansenists.

Although many art critics were sure that paintings representing scenes from the Old Testament were in decline, the theme remained popular all throughout the second half of the 19th century. The genre nonetheless faced major challenges because traditional models were being toppled by archaeological discoveries in the Middle East, and the period was one of secularism in which science played an ever-increasing role in the reading of what Gustave Larroumet called «the darkest pages of the Bible». Painters who undertook to illustrate the Old Testament thus had to satisfy contradictory expectations because faithfulness to the texts clashed with new requirements for authenticity and for spectacularity, but works such as Fernand Cormon's Caïn (1880) perhaps drew their originality (if not their modernity) from this audacious attempt to reconcile the words of the Bible with the injunctions of early Naturalism.

The populations of the Himalayan regions do not neatly dissociate the comic from the sacred. Five main categories of clowns and tricksters take part in ceremonial life and in collective festivals : jesters/magicians, Brahmins or Hindu ascetics, Tibetan atsara clowns, shamanic jesters and personified demons. These comic characters are closely related to supernatural powers. They are equivocal, ambiguous figures, at once frightening and enticing, who overturn roles and stir up the winds of liberty. They frighten away evil spirits, placate divinities and oversee fertility rituals. These representations are among the most erudite aspects of the religious realm.

Since it was not possible to bring up every aspect of Dominique Iogna-Prat's book, Cité de Dieu, cité des hommes [City of God, City of Men], the authors of this critical note chose to punctuate their reading with questions that progress gradually towards the central point of the work: the construction of modernity through the transfer of sacredness. The questions first involve the double metonymy Church/church and the Medieval concept of the city, and then move towards the meaning of the appropriation of Aristotle in the late Middle Ages, and finally examine the architectonic paradigm that presided over the birth of the Modern world.