Prêcher sur le prêche. La réflexion de Maurice de Sully sur l’importance et la nature de la prédication

The paper presents an analysis of the work of Maurice de Sully, bishop of Paris (1160–96) and the author of one of the earliest complete collections of sermons for lay people. The focus of the analysis is the idea of the preaching as it was understood by the preachers themselves. The importance and the nature of this pastoral activity are quite often presented in the sermons. They also seem to be alluded to through the structure of the sermons and vocabulary used by the preacher.     

Rêves et visions dans le Liber de exemplis et similitudinibus rerum de Jean de San Gimignano

Dans le Liber de exemplis et similitudinibus rerum, Jean de San Gimignano consacre le septième livre aux produits de l’imagination, et plus particulièrement aux visions et aux rêves. Il y développe une réflexion qui vise à montrer à ses lecteurs supposés, en premier lieu aux prédicateurs, de quelles manières ceux-ci peuvent trouver leur place dans un sermon. L’article étudie comment le dominicain italien a envisagé l’utilisation des rêves bibliques et de leur interprétation à des fins homilétiques ainsi que l’attitude somme toute ambiguë de l’auteur du Liber de exemplis à l’égard des traités d’oniromancie.     

Entre Huguenots et Valteline: La France,les Archiducs et la fin de la Trêve de Douze Ans, 1619–21

Abstract

Le rôle qu’a joué la France dans les négociations menant à la Trêve de Douze Ans a déjà reçu bien des attentions de la part des historiens des relations internationales à l’époque moderne. Dans cette contribution, je voudrais analyser et expliquer l’attitude des dirigeants français vis-à-vis d’une éventuelle prolongation de la Trêve, qui allait expirer en avril 1621. Ceci est en effet un aspect qui a reçu nettement moins d’attention dans l’historiographie des relations diplomatiques entre la France et les Habsbourg d’Espagne. Utilisant la correspondance de Jean de Péricard, ambassadeur français à Bruxelles pendant les dernières années du régime souverain des archiducs Albert et Isabelle, cette contribution démontrera que le jeune roi Louis XIII et ses conseillers désiraient une rupture de la Trêve pour deux principales raisons. Premièrement, par la création d’un nouveau front aux Pays-Bas, ils désiraient opposer l’expansion du pouvoir espagnol en Allemagne et dans la Valteline. Deuxièmement, les dirigeants français désiraient aussi affaiblir la République des Provinces-Unies, qui soutenait les rebelles huguenots s’opposant au pouvoir royal. Dans cette optique, la principale tâche de l’ambassadeur français à Bruxelles était de contrecarrer les initiatives indépendantes des archiducs.     

La Méditerranée solide: un espace double en construction

There exists a space of the ‘solid Mediterranean’. This concept was first proposed by the Annales’s co-founder Lucien Febvre in 1944–45, during a course on Europe in the longue durée. The flexible borders of this double space, both conceptual and contextual, remain in construction within the on-going and global reality of the solid Mediterranean’s space. The comparative history of European societies promoted during the interwar period by Marc Bloch, the other Annales founder, contributes to the construction of said space. Examining this space allows us to concretely articulate scales of analysis from the local to the global. The article is based on a comparative analysis of two Italian and Spanish cases that appear to be particular and paradigmatic (‘exceptional normal’, Edoardo Grendi) of – respectively – Italy’s so-called ‘southern question’ (questione meridionale) and the Spanish ‘agrarian question’ (cuestión agraria). Thus the article helps to conceptualize the space of the Méditerranée solide, marked by the complex and long-term Southern European question. The article compares Il Ministro della mala vita (The Minister of the Corruption, 1910) by historian Gaetano Salvemini and Del caciquismo trágico (On Tragical Caciquism, 1913) by republican journalist Pedro Torres. Through these ‘exceptionally normal’ case studies, taken together and explained reciprocally, it is possible to better understand the space of the solid Mediterranean. The social realities of the Spanish cuestión agraria and the Italian questione meridionale, as well as the conditions of local historiographical production on such realities are, indeed, a consubstantial part of the European transnational, global space of the ‘solid Mediterranean’.     

La ejecución de Atahuallpa: Símbolo andino de colapso y resistencia

This article studies Los dramas de Atahuallpa (Atahuallpa's Dramas) as an oral and ritual memory of the Andean natives. In those texts are traces of the resistance of the European domination initiated during the middle of the sixteenth century. They also recall the destruction of the Inca empire. The discussion points out the work done by the panaca, a Tahuantisuyo institution dedicated to preserving the memory of each Incan emperor's public life. During the twentieth century and the present years of the twenty-first, the tradition of representing Atahuallpa's death has been an expression of the political projects built by the native Andean as well as a symbol of the resistance against the conquest and its results.     

La fealdad de Safo: su tratamiento eufemístico en Leopardi

The ugliness of Sappho, despite the credibility it has enjoyed for centuries, has always been circumvented or attenuated in scholarly works, and even more so in literary recreations of the life and death of this celebrated muse. These strategies range from the portrait of Sappho as a beautiful woman to expressing her ugliness via euphemistic formulas: that which is resorted to most is the negation of the antonym (Sappho is not beautiful). Leopardi, with his Ultimo canto di Saffo, stands out among those who have explored this particular path in depth. Analysis of the most direct sources of this poem, as well as of some of its translations and imitations in Spanish, helps to see how in Leopardi euphemistic negation interweaves and fuses with suicidal negation, beautifying “nothingness” and suggesting readings at a second level, which simplify and run contrary to the logic of the discourse.