Remarques sur le servage au Bourbonnais au XVe siécle

The terrier of the lordship of Maussat and La Romagière, drawn up in 1470–1480, is the principal source of information for this study of serfdom in western Bourbonnais. Conclusions are drawn from this source concerning the proportion of serfs in the population as a whole, the nature of the bonds of dependence, the ways of becoming a serf, and the obligations and rights of both lord and serf. The possibilities of serfs making socioeconomic progress through the concentration of tenures in a small number of servile families and the exercise of ministeriality are considered. The study demonstrates the dynamism and importance of serfdom in the organisation of the lordship. La condition du servage dans la seigneurie de Maussat et de La Romagière - à l'Ouest du Bourbonnais - a ètè ètudié à partir du tm?oignage principal du terrier de cette seigneurie, rédigé en 1470–1480. Dans ce travail, on établit: (1) La population totale de la seigneurie et celle de chacun des groupes afin de connaître l'importance quantitative du servage: 25% du total des dépendants; (2) La nature de lien de dépendance: serfs personnels ou réels, les premiers étant beaucoup plus nombreux; (3) Les voies menant au servage - héritage et accord - toutes deux en pleine vigueur; (4) Les obligations et les droits des serfs, et les droits du seigneur montrant une nette amélioration dans la condition du servage. On analyse enfin les possibilités d'évolution du groupe grâce à la concentration de tenures par un petit nombre de familles serviles et par l'exercise de la ministérialité. Cette étude permet de constater le dynamisme du servage et son importance dans l'organisation de la seigneurie.     

Le crépuscule des Dieux: Regards sur le polythéisme hindou et l'athéisme bouddhique (XVIIe‐XIXe siècle)

From the Age of Classicism to the Age of the Enlightenment. Indian heathendom (that is to say, Hinduism as it was perceived in those times) provided Europe with the spectacle of an incomparable profusion of polytheism. But if India appeared as the living sanctuary of countless divinities, it had also been the cradle of Buddhism which disappeared from its native land to spread over an immense part of Asia. Buddhism was conceived of as an “absolute atheism”; whose fundamental doctrine — the famous nirvana — was considered to be a form of nihilism which had no equivalent in the history of the human mind. Thus, the historiographical discourse on religious matters in India fits into a triad‐like structure in which atheism plays a pivotal role between monotheism and polytheism. A long time after the scholarly discovery of Hinduism and Buddhism, the archaic aspect of this discourse constantly reveals itself in the residual nature of the myth of the double doctrine and the persistence of the theme of the Monster. For philologists and historians of religions until the beginning of the twentieth century, Indian excesses in the religious domain continue to constitute a violation of Reason and Nature.     

Les objets de la chose théorie du hasard et surréalisme au xxe siècle

On the basis of the trajectory of something made of paster which had impassioned the statisticians of the years 1880 and which furnished André Breton the very exemple for the notion of a surrealist object, one wonders whether the surrealist theory of chance was born by chance. By translating the issue which Ernest Coumet addressed in 1970 concerning the Pascalian geometry of chance, we investigate here the relationship between the history of science, art history and the history of scientific culture during the last century. In return, we hope to suggest why Coumet's article opened such a wide horizon in the history of the theory of probabilities thirty years ago.