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In fifteenth-century Augsburg, the urban elites rarely wrote their family history, unlike their peers in Frankfurt or Nuremberg. They did, however, make extensive use of the written word : the abundance of historical production in the city is well known, often interpreted as a way for their authors to base their identity on identification with their city. To grasp all the memorial strategies of city dwellers, however, one must go significantly beyond the scope of the texts commonly considered in this field. There were indeed family writings in Augsburg after 1450, but they were not exclusively produced by the elites: alongside the wealthy Walther or Gossembrot, the wife of a small administrative employee produced a short family chronicle which was continued by her son, which shows that the influence of aristocratic models was not necessary here and that the patrician and merchant elites were not necessarily the forerunners. The uses of history itself are far from being reduced to a unitary civic ideology : the position of Hector Mülich, for whom the narrative of ancient times is not enough, is quite different from that of Sigmund Gossembrot, a patrician for whom antiquity is the best guarantee of nobility – the study of two armorials, that of Mülich and that of a brother of Sigmund Gossembrot, confirms this discrepancy. The asserted neutrality of Mülich's account, who is only present in his text as a warrant for certain events, is a significant personal choice, not the pure expression of a collective identity. The next generation, by contrast, uses this seemingly neutral substrate to develop a new, directly and explicitly political use of history, as an affirmation of social distinction. In addition to these civic and household motifs, however, other themes are also present, which give the individual a much greater significance than is usually assumed. From the merchant and patrician Hans Rem, who described his prodigious enrichment in the second half of the fourteenth century in a text known only indirectly, to the collector of orders Sebastian Ilsung, or to Jörg Rephon, who carefully inventoried all the kingdoms he had visited, there is no uniform way of recording one's merits and honours. Pilgrimage accounts, in that they do not put their author in the foreground and even less so their own experience, are diametrically opposed to this self-centered perspective, but they also contribute to exposing their authors, both for the prestige that the visit to the holy places gave them and for the elevation proper to the genre of the pilgrimage account itself. The most original of these memorial strategies is certainly that of Peter Egen/von Argon, a major figure in urban life from the 1430s to his exile in 1450: not only did he have the history of the Trojan origins of his city written down and used as the subject of a series of frescoes in his urban palace, but he also ordered the production of two unusual volumes, both of which listed Peter Egen's landholdings and seigneurial rights in the city and its surroundings. In these volumes, he kept alive the memory of his father, around Saint Anthony's Hospital that he had founded, but he presented himself above all as a landlord, underlining both the fiefs held from prestigious lords and the properly seigneurial rights (justice…) that he held over entire villages. The material aspect of the volumes themselves shows that they are indeed a strategy of prestige and not simple management instruments. Split between personal and family identity, between a broad vision of the man of the world and identification with the city, the memorial strategies of the citizens of Augsburg thus go far beyond the stereotypes attached to the “medieval bourgeois”, or even to the “medieval man”; their very diversity shows the extent of the possible choices, while at the same time demonstrating that these memorial constructions were not the prerogative of the merchant or patrician elites, who were themselves very far from being united by a common culture.

In the first half of the seventeenth century, during the ravages of the Thirty Years' War, Protestant northern Germany saw a proliferation of “Sprachgesellschaften”, or “language societies”. The most famous one was the “Société des Fructifiants” (Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft), just as much by the princely and aristocratic renown of many of its members as by their involvement in the cultural life of their time. These members, driven by a linguistic patriotism, were nonetheless the translators of numerous written works by French authors, amost all of them Huguenots, in which they found some resource for their religion threatened by the Imperial Counter-Reformation, and expectations for the future. Two princes of the House of Anhalt, Louis of Anhalt-Köthen et his nephew Christian II of Anhalt-Bernburg, distinguished themselves : Louis was the first “spiritus rector” of this society and the creator of the printing house of Köthen which published all the works and translations of its members, while Christian was the author of the finest journal (Tagebuch) of this early 17th century, between late humanism and the Baroque.

Natural history cabinets and museums in French Catholic institutions reflect the relationship with nature and with science in the Church in France. Between the 1820s and 1860s, the first collections were built up in Catholic schools and religious congregations for educational purposes, most of the time on the initiative of teachers. Making collections was seen as a way to develop rigour and to get in touch with Creation. As such, they were seen as a means of forming a good Christian. The end of the 19th century was the golden age of these cabinets and museums. Then, the collections grew dramatically, thanks to the clerical networks and the help of the missionaries. The showcasing of domesticated nature became an issue of communication, particularly during the school war, which opposed Catholic establishments and state-run schools. From the interwar period onwards, natural history cabinets suffered from a declining interest. A technical vision of nature was spreading and, in schools, natural history cabinets and museums were no longer used. However, new approaches contributed to reviving the collections after the 1930s. These could be scientific, when the natural history cabinet evolved into a laboratory. And at the end of the 20th century, the development was more from a heritage perspective, under the impetus of congregations. These congregations saw the inherited cabinets as a means of highlighting their own history as well as of contributing to the teaching or development of science. The natural history cabinets and museums of Catholic institutions reflect the extent of the naturalist collections carried out by the secular and missionary clergy and the attention paid to scientific education. Their study thus contributes to the reassessment of the place of the Church in the history of science, which has long been underestimated. It also shows the place of nature in the Catholic Church. The display of nature is not unique to religious institutions, but it is based on specific motivations. In the 19th century, setting up a cabinet was a way of saying something about Creation, either in a scientific way, at a time of debate on evolution, or in a sensitive way, by promoting the beauty of the world as proof of the existence of God.

Each century produces a certain amount of songs. How are they selected, melody and lyrics, by following generations? Why does a song become a heritage when another sinks in oblivion? The idea that popular songs are both an expression of earth and people echoes a theme developped by literary and musicological studies since the mid-19th century : the return to song “of yesteryear”. “Old song” and “popular song” are categories which have been coined at the same moment in the first part of 19th c. Between then and formerly, the chronological amplitude of this “formerly” however remains to be determined, especially since the terminology used is itself random. This paper aims at lighten the confusion that has gradually arisen between the notion of “popular” and “old” or “historical” song, which ennobles by the time some of popular songs that were nevertheless discredited at the time of their production, until giving them other uses, particularly in the political field. These lexical questions are at source of a process of patrimonialization of French song which began in the middle of 19th century, when the production of songs entered the era of mass music industry, which creates new categories necessary for its development. The place and function of the oldest repertoires of songs are then rethought because they are no longer listened like the “new songs” essentially produced for stage and entertainment. This paper ambitions to pave the way for a history of the process by which songs are selected and become historical, from the first half of the 19th c. to the middle of the 20th c., when songs began to be industrially produced.