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  • Moyen d’action privilégié de la papauté réformée depuis la fin du xie siècle, la légation constitue l’un des outils essentiels de la diplomatie pontificale dans les siècles suivants. Pourtant, si l’on considère les différents pouvoirs attribués aux cardinaux envoyés représenter les intérêts du Saint-Siège, on est frappé de constater qu’ils répondent fort imparfaitement à ce que serait une définition de l’action diplomatique moderne. En particulier, on remarque en leur sein de nombreuses capac...

  • In 1346, Philip VI of Valois enacted the Ordinance of Brunoy. This lengthy document aimed at reorganizing the kingdom’s forest administration in order to ensure that royal forests remained sufficiently profitables and adequately managed. For most of the past century, historians have believed the Ordinance of Brunoy to be the first true expression of the forest policies of the French crown. In reality, Philip VI benefited from a wealth of regulations already in place which had been developped by his predecessors since the beginning of the XIIIth century. It can be argued that the reign of Philip Augustus, and especially his conquest of Normandy in 1204, truly marks the inception of the first forest policies by the French royal government. From that time on, royal forests in Normandy were managed according to a set of strict regulations aiming at limiting usage rights and guaranteeing a steady contribution to the kingdom’s finances. Forests during the Middle Ages served multiple purposes : beside their input in royal finances, they were vital to rural economy, and formed a space over which medieval princes exercised their justice, authority, power and generosity. The study of administrative sources from XIIIth and XIVth Normandy gives a better understanding of the development of these early policies, which revolved around the creation of a new administration headed by the masters of « Eaux et Forêts » and the formulation, under the auspices of common good, of a set of rules and regulations aiming at maintaining a balance between conservation, exploitation and usages. In truth, the forests of medieval Normandy were far from the archetypal woodlands of medieval litterature : they appear as a well delimited and rationalized space, managed and monitered by the king’s officers, and formed an area of contact and conflict between the royal government and the forests’ users.

  • A direct access to the foundational texts of the Christian faith in vernacular languages was part of the basic demands of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. The French linguistic domaine was no exception in this regard. Henri Estienne, in his Apologie pour Hérodote, alludes to a specific anonymous literature dedicated to this question in response to biblical censorship in the 1540’s. Our investigations in these primary sources lead our attention on two pamphlets which have remained almost unknown to most bibliographers: 1) TRAICTE AUQUEL / est deduict s’il est loisible de / lire la saincte Escriture en / langue Vulgaire, & / du fruict qui en peult sortir. (s.l.n.d. , 80, italique, 94 p., signé a-f8, marginales, titres courants, 2 initiales ornées (a 2r0; 3v0). 2) TRAITE, / QU’IL EST NECESSAIRE / QUE TOUTES GENS DE QUEL- / que qualité, sexe, ou aage, qu’ils / soient, lisent les Saintes Escri- / tures : Et du moyen qu’on / y peut tenir. (s.l., s.n., 1561, avec une marque aux palmes du martyr couronnées), 80, italique, 36 ff., signé A-D8, E4, marginales, titres courants, 1 initiale (Aii ro). These two treatises clearly disclose a protestant and reformed content. Moreover, the numerous biblical, literary and patristic quotations they contain, more specificaly the 1561 edition, show that they where penned by master’s and not by disciples. Many candidates to their authorship have been considered and among these it is the religious work of Pierre Viret that offers the most ressemblances with the two pamphlets. The observations summed up to this day have convinced us that the first booklet, published in 1544 and mentioned for the first time in 1549 in the Parisian catalogue of prohibited books (Index de Paris, with the notice 1543) forms the editio princeps of an unprecedented work of the Swiss Reformer. It is part of our thesis that this booklet was later completely rewritten by Pierre Viret and published in Paris in 1561 under a new title. The Viretian paternity of these two tracts will be proven in the present research with the help of quotations, textual connections and other arguments based on the internal and external criticism of primary sources. Here follows a brief summary of our demonstration. The analysis of the first booklet (henceforth: T1) reveals a tight relationship with the style and ideas of Pierre Viret as can be seen in his works printed between 1542 and 1555. Among the reminiscent passages, one must point out many borrowings from De la difference qui est entre les superstitions et idolatries des anciens gentilz et payens… (Geneva, 1542), an important work which Viret has often reused in his subsequent writings. We also found a brief extract of T1 in the Dialogues du desordre qui est a present au monde (Geneva, 1545) and in the Métamorphose chrestienne (1561), which prove a later reuse of this source by Viret. A carefull reading of T1 also reveals an import from Marie Dentière’s Epistre tresutile (1539) and Calvin’s Epistre monstrant comment Christ est la fin de la loi (1543). Our findings have also allowed us to put forward plausible and instructive suggestions, which still need to be validated, regarding the immediate editorial context of T1. On this matter, one will note that T1 was released when editions of the Bible, the Psalter and the New Testament were regularly and largely printed both in Geneva and Lyon. These geographical area were two biblical publishing centers following very similar patterns of eristic and religious discourses. Several issues were parts of confessional polarization on both sides. Our research on T1 was extended with the discovery of the 1561 treatise mentioned earlier (henceforth: T2). A carefull comparison of the two treatises suggests that latter is a profoundly reviewed reedition of the former. We are the first to have made this connexion. Viret’s well known literary habits, specially since the mid 1550’s, confirm this hypothesis. However a meticulous comparative study between T2 and Viret’s contemporary writings had to be undertaken before drawing any conclusion. The results of the inquiry are eloquent: T2 overlaps with most of his books published between 1559 and 1565 (strict textual kinship of ideas and style, verbatim recoveries, paraphrases). T2 even picks up a short extract from an important work De la difference qui est entre les supersitions (1542), a book we have underscored, with other historians, the value in Viret's bibliographical and literary repertoire. In short, our findings can be summarized as follows: T1 borrows from Viret, Viret borrows from T1 and T2, and the latter draws from T1 and Viret. Viret probably composed T2 shortly after he left Geneva for France (at the end of September 1561). Nîmes is the most likely location where he wrote this tract. Internal indications, to which external testimonies can be added, lead us to think that Viret wrote this short pamphlet with the intention of rallying the King of Navarre, his court and the nobility to the Reformed faith that is at a key moment when the Huguenots where largely increasing in numbers accross the kingdom, especially in the Southern cities where highly ranked families and many intellectuals enthousiastically clinged to the protestant theses. Hence, in the beginning of the 1560’s, Hugenots where forming a genuine political strength capable to inflect the Kingdom’s destiny in its most sensitive center: the monarchy. T2's context falls in line with the colloque de Poissy, an important event that took place in Paris between September 9 and October 14, 1561. There are reasons to believe that Viret's second treatise was largely disseminated in the French capital city since the printed typographical characters match those used by Nicolas Edoard and Charles Pesnot, namely two protestant printers active at the time of the Poissy colloquium. Differing on this particular point from T1, T2 was thus produced at a time when the process of "confession-building" of religious discourses was making it all the more evident that two conflictual and irreconcilable ecclesiologies were at stake within the same kingdom. In short, the religious debates where now deploying under a political spin. Hence, T2 appeared at a very critical moment when religious debates revolved around the political implications of the decline of the Catholic Valois and the rise of the Protestant Bourbons. Less than a year after the publishing of T2, on 2 April 1562, Condé and his Protestant followers seized the city of Orléans. Their example was soon followed by Protestant groups across the realm. The same year saw the outbreak of the first of the eight religious wars that would plague the kingdom during the rest of the century. By his immense literary input, to which our thesis now adds two new primary sources (which the reader will find herein with scientific annotations), and by his intensive fieldwork as a reformer – both in the Genevan-Swiss milieu and in France since the early 1560’s up until his death in 1571 (one year before the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre) – Pierre Viret will have not only been an important witness but a leading protagonist of the debate over the democratization of the Bible in the vernacular and the theological evolution surrounding this major controversy of the Reformation and post-Reformation era.

Dernière mise à jour depuis la base de données : 18/07/2025 13:00 (EDT)

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