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Despite the almost complete absence of domestic accounts, the study of the court and residence of Margaret of France, countess Palatine of Flanders, Artois, and Burgundy (1312–1382) reveals the importance of food in representing royal power. Food demonstrates the financial and practical ability of the maître d'hôtel and staff to cater for an itinerant court while satisfying the contemporary conventions of the aristocracy, giving pride of place to meat but also to saltwater fish. The countess's ability to provide for her entourage was dependent on a high level of flexibility when it came to supplies. She was also self-reliant and knew how to “live by her own means,” with wine delivered to Artois from her territory in Franche-Comté. However, this did not prevent her from exploiting her seigneurial rights, to the detriment of the market and of certain suppliers who were reluctant to do business with her. The countess therefore illustrated, by means of the dining table, the form of a good government in several respects: ethics, guided by Christian virtues, most notably charity; economy, based on the competent management of her household and structured around the principal of aristocratic generosity; and finally politics, as hosting these events, especially during celebrations, enabled her to gather her allies, relatives, and subjects.

In the 870s, Heiric of Auxerre and Adrevald of Fleury wrote Miracula about Saint Germanus and Saint Benedict respectively. Neither of these writers limited themselves to relating the miraculous recoveries of their own times; on the contrary, their Miracula are long histories of the sanctuaries and communities that serve them, drawing on written sources as well as oral testimonies. They therefore bear witness to the historicization of hagiography, a distinctive feature of the Carolingian ninth century. Heiric considers the writing of history as a stylistic task that entails a wide range of historiographic genres (Annales, Histoire, Gesta). Adrevald regards history instead as a critical lesson on the use of power. A comparison of these two works proves that the writing of history was a discipline that both these intellectuals had mastered, and that hagiography was one of their favored sites of experimentation.

This article addresses the role of the sacred in the writing of Gautier de Coincy. By analyzing the relationship that Miracles of Notre Dame establishes between the question of the choice of language (Latin or French) and that of style (simple or ornate), we show that the author reconfigures the oppositional relations between two languages: the relation between Latin and the vernacular no longer involves a competition between a sacred and profane language respectively, but rather between two different types of relation to the divine, coinciding with the Isidorian separation between sacrum and religiosum. Whereas the use of Latin expresses the emergence of a God who only reveals himself in order to show his inaccessible nature, French expresses the possibility of a form of sacred that will inhabit the reader's heart. Latin then appears to be a religious language in the Isidorian sense of the word: the language of tradition and the reproduction of rites that do not involve the interiority of the person practicing them. French then becomes the only truly sacred language, that of an intimate meeting with God.

In 1369, Jean Golein, o.carm, was commissioned by King Charles V to translate into French a collection of seventeen Latin texts by Bernard Gui, o.p. He gathered them in a manuscript of which several folia later went missing (Vatican, BAV, Reg. lat. 697), and along with them notable fractions of four texts preserved in what has been considered the sole copy of the seventeen works since its nineteenth-century uncovering. Bringing forth a second, little-known manuscript (Paris, BnF, Naf. 6776), this paper provides a restoration for four lacunae of the collection. The text of two works about French history is hence fully recovered: the Arbre de la genealogie des roys de France and the Roys de France.

This article focuses on the Histoires of Gregory of Tours and aims to demonstrate that the author was principally addressing the future kings Theudebert II and Theuderic II in order to urge them not to plunge Gaul into civil war. To do this, we first need to determine the timing of the composition of the Histoires and the author's main addressees. The first two sections are therefore devoted to supporting the hypothesis of a late date of composition, and identifying the sons of Childebert II as the kings who are addressed most directly. Finally, the last section discusses the preface to the fifth book of the Histoires, which is one of the most important chapters of the entire work, to illustrate the form of rhetoric, inspired by the tradition of late antiquity that the author used throughout the work.