Antoine Brix, Devenir l’histoire de France. La fortune des Grandes Chroniques de France au Moyen Âge, Aubervilliers, Éd. du CTHS, 2024, 416 p.

In the first third of the 14th century, several attempts were made to extend the " Roman des rois ", i.e. the original nucleus of the Grandes Chroniques de France, compiled at Saint-Denis by the monk Primat, beyond 1223. The preferred solution was to use the Chronique française abrégée des rois de France by Guillaume de Nangis, enlarged and continued at Saint-Denis after his death. In the 1350s, Richard Lescot chose a somewhat different option : he reverted to the Vitae of Louis IX and Philip III, and next devised a compilation based on the Chronique française abrégée and the Chronicon of Guillaume de Nangis together with its two Latin continuations. From 1322, the second continuation, being the main source for the period, was supplemented with the chronicle of Géraud de Frachet and the Chronique de Flandre. After 1340, although he kept using the continuation of Géraud de Frachet's chronicle up to the point where the original breaks off in 1344, the compiler ceased to use the Chronique de Flandre. Instead, up to 1347, he made conspicuous use of the continuation of Guillaume de Nangis's Chronique française abrégée. All known copies of that text extend into the early 1380s, and thus belong to a later period than the " Richard Lescot version " of the Grandes Chroniques de France. But it can be proved that an intermediate version once existed, one that ended shortly before the surrender of Calais in 1347. By taking into account these two sources, of which one was incorrectly identified (the Chronique de Flandre) and one hitherto unknown (the continuation of the Chronique française abrégée), it is possible to shed new light upon the methods of the author responsible for the reign of Philip VI in the Grandes Chroniques. des rois de France by Guillaume de Nangis, enlarged and continued at Saint-Denis after his death. In the 1350s, Richard Lescot chose a somewhat different option : he reverted to the Vitae of Louis IX and Philip III, and next devised a compilation based on the Chronique française abrégée and the Chronicon of Guillaume de Nangis together with its two Latin continuations. From 1322, the second continuation, being the main source for the period, was supplemented with the chronicle of Géraud de Frachet and the Chronique de Flandre. After 1340, although he kept using the continuation of Géraud de Frachet's chronicle up to the point where the original breaks off in 1344, the compiler ceased to use the Chronique de Flandre. Instead, up to 1347, he made conspicuous use of the continuation of Guillaume de Nangis's Chronique française abrégée. All known copies of that text extend into the early 1380s, and thus belong to a later period than the " Richard Lescot version " of the Grandes Chroniques de France. But it can be proved that an intermediate version once existed, one that ended shortly before the surrender of Calais in 1347. By taking into account these two sources, of which one was incorrectly identified (the Chronique de Flandre) and one hitherto unknown (the continuation of the Chronique française abrégée), it is possible to shed new light upon the methods of the author responsible for the reign of Philip VI in the Grandes Chroniques.

le mobilier en ivoire et en os Pompi

A certain ecologist art form has been on the rise for the past twenty years. Those artworks include documents. The analysis will take two examples : Tale as Tool, and Chroniques de l’accueil. The use of documents doesn't deal with representation, as it used to be in art, but with inquiries. The ecological art tries to trigger testimonies and transformations of the common representation of nature. They don’t use documents as a trace but for their diplomatic capabilities. The document doesn’t record events or facts but it changes the situation. The ecological artists come with this paradoxical art stance : recording the existing state of social relation to transform it.

Chroniques de théorie politique

The article analyzes another possible source of A. S. Pushkin’s novella The Queen of Spades, associated with the French historical realities of the life story of the old countess. The authors believe that the poet might have used The Rollicking Chronicles (Chroniques de l’Œil de Bœuf) by G. Touchard-Lafosse, while the frst edition of the book was published shortly before Pushkin’s text. Certain signifcant realities of The Queen of Spades are easily traceable in this source: Montgolfer’s hot air balloon, Mesmer’s magnetism, playing pharaoh at court, the description of Count Saint-Germain and the principal components of his myth. Comparing the respective parts of Pushkin’s text with the Chronicles, we came up with a slightly different outlook on the well-known work of russian classical literature.

While the taller alfonsi was working on the Estoria de Espana, a monk of the abbey of Saint-Denis, named Primat, completed the first sec- tion of the so-called Grandes Chroniques de France (1274), a chronicle of the French kings from their supposed Trojan origins to his own era. Around 1350 the Grandes Chroniques were further elaborated and up- dated. The impressive work done by the monks at Saint-Denis, and later by a royal official, is by no means unrivaled, as is often claimed (Gabrielle Spiegel, Chronicle Tradition 1 2). The parallels between French and Castilian regal, official historiography are numerous and de- serve an in-depth comparison. I want to focus on a marginal aspect which is central to the understanding of the structural coherence and social logic ( Spiegel, Past as Text. 26) of French and Spanish royal historiography from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century: sketches of the kings which conclude the account of the events which occurred during their reign. In a perceptive article Gabrielle Spiegel has argued that the me- dieval historical text is a transparency and history (is) apprehended as perceptual field (Genealog) 46). Hence the historiographical la- bor is shaped by structures preexisting in the historiographer's Lebenswelt . Spiegel calls these structures 'perceptual grids', which di- rected the historian's glance at relatively fixed categories of human experience and governed both the nature of his perceptions and the manner in which he transmitted them (46). It is her claim that gene- alogy is the principal perceptual grid diat moulds the Grandes Chroniques de France. Written and read in the genealogical mode, history becomes

oration, if not the whole production, of the manuscript. An even more fascinating, but correspondingly more complex, problem concerns the kind of relationship that might have existed between the St. Andrew Master, an artist who worked in both the MorganMacon Golden Legend and the Chroniques de Hainaut, and the Guillaume Wyelant who was paid for illuminating the Chroniques, Volume II (Brussels, Bibliotheque Royale, Ms 9243), as well as the Willem Vrelant whose name was frequently mentioned in records of the Bruges miniaturists' guild. University of Maryland College Park, MD 20742

Après avoir proposé un rapide itinéraire des attestations arthuriennes dans le Mélyador et les Dits de Froissart, cette contribution examine les attestations arthuriennes, somme toute peu nombreuses, dans les Chroniques. Il s’agit de faire le départ entre le fonctionnement de la devise et l’indice d’une propagande de la royauté anglaise autour de la figure centrale d’Édouard III.

A passage from the Grandes Chroniques de France claims that the rebuilding of the nave of Saint-Denis in the 1230s marked the first new construction there since Dagobert built the church in the seventh century. The text’s omission of Abbot Suger’s famous campaigns in the 1130s and 1140s, which the abbot himself did so much to commemorate, provides an opportunity to assess Suger’s reception, to see if and how his hope to be remembered was realized in the centuries after his death. Reviewing the evidence from Saint-Denis’ chronicles and inventories, we find that the years around 1300 marked a turning point in Suger’s posthumous reputation. Some of this is probably the inevitable result of the passage of time, as the living memory of Suger died; it also results from the desire to celebrate the ambitious construction at the abbey in the thirteenth century. The article concludes by comparing the memory of Suger with that of other celebrated patrons, including Bernward of Hildesheim, Louis IX, and Anquetil of Moissac.

The French translations of the Spanish chivalric romance Amadis de Gaula constituted a literary hype in the 1540s. Francois Rabelais published his first book, Pantagruel , in 1532, followed by Grandes Chroniques de Gargantua in 1535. An important episode of Rabelaisian medievalism is found in Pantagruel , which recounts the descent of one of Rabelais's characters, Epistemon, into the underworld. This chapter briefly turns to Rabelais's second book Gargantua . One of the main differences between Rabelais's book and his model is the complete absence of the matiere de Bretagne . The chapter concludes that the evolution of Rabelais's books should not solely be explained within the vacuum of a work-immanent analysis, or by an exclusively biographical or historical perspective, but also in a broader perspective of his positioning in a changing literary field, by which he is influenced, and which he himself also influenced. Keywords: Amadis de Gaula ; Grandes Chroniques de Gargantua ; Pantagruel ; Rabelaisian medievalism

This article sets Chaucer’s rhymed English translation of Petrarch’s Griselda story (the Clerk’s Tale) and his “Envoy de Chaucer” into the context of contemporary French political instrumentalizations of Petrarch’s Griselda story by Philippe de Mézières and high-level French chancery officials, who persuaded the widowed Richard II to marry Charles VI’s six-year-old daughter, Isabelle, as an easily trainable “new Griseldis.” Evidence comes chiefly from the comparative study of Mézières’s Epistre au Roi Richart, relevant sections of Froissart’s Chronicles and of the Grandes Chroniques de France, and analysis of the text and illustrations of the small vellum manuscript of the Livre de l’istoire de Griseldis (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France fr. 2203), a rhymed, dramatized version of Petrarch’s Griselda story surviving in a single copy dated 1395 by its colophon and probably made by French chancery officers for the instruction and entertainment of little Isabelle.

The image of history as a mirror, in which the past reflected, guided and justified the present, and against which the virtues and the vices of contemporary society could be measured, was a familiar one to moralists, chroniclers and political thinkers in the Middle Ages. In recent years, historical writing has been studied not only in its own right, but also as a source of reflection on attitudes towards the medieval state. It therefore seems appropriate to link two themes on which Peter Lewis has contributed his own particular insights: the complex realities of political relationships and ‘power distribution’ between the king and his subjects; and historiography in late medieval France. The title of this chapter was inspired by Peter Lewis’ article entitled ‘The Centre, the Periphery and the Problem of Power Distribution in Later Medieval France’, published in 1981. ‘The centre of the kingdom’, he wrote, ‘was wherever the king, his court or the great departments of state happened to be … The centre itself could seem remote … [but the] periphery … did not lack its lines of communication, both moral and physical, with the centre’. ‘Centre’, therefore, may, but does not necessarily have to, be geographical: it is, above all, political. Parts of the kingdom may be ‘isolated’, particularly in time of war, but have contact, through a ‘multiplicity of agents’. One such line of moral and affective communication could be found in historiography: this, too, has been seen in terms of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’. But which is which? According to recent studies, the ‘centre’ is epitomised by the Grandes Chroniques de France . To summarise a complex problem, this composite historical text stems from a late thirteenth-century vernacular translation of a corpus of Latin chronicles initially collected or composed at the abbey of Saint-Denis; the vernacular text was continued to the late fourteenth century using material produced within and outside the abbey (the ‘vulgate’ or ‘edition of 1380’), and, with the addition of further material taking it into the fifteenth century, was among the first vernacular texts to be published in Paris (1477). Although the influence of this particular text has not been systematically studied, it can none the less be detected in later histories of France.

Reviewed by: L’Ost des Sarrasins: les Musulmans dans l’iconographie médiévale (France–Flandre XIIIe–XVe siècle) by Fanny Caroff Darren M. Smith Caroff, Fanny, L’Ost des Sarrasins: les Musulmans dans l’iconographie médiévale (France–Flandre XIIIe–XVe siècle), Paris, Le Léopard d’Or, 2016; hardback; pp. 327; 70 colour illustrations; R.R.P. €115.00; ISBN 9782863772546. Enriched with a catalogue of seventy illuminations, this study of the ‘Saracen’ in medieval Christian illuminations makes a valuable contribution to scholarship on alterity and race in medieval Europe. Caroff works with manuscripts from northern France and Flanders stretching from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, with most manuscripts devoted specifically to the crusades and others belonging to broader chronicle works (such as the Grandes Chroniques de France). Importantly, Caroff explores this iconography in its own right, not just as an adjunct to literary texts, examining the visual vocabulary used by illuminators to represent Muslims. The work is divided into five parts. First, she looks at how military scenes (landings, battles, duels, sieges) comprise the main mise en scène for representations of Muslims. If military conflict constituted the preponderant setting, then weaponry (such as the scimitar) becomes an important motif. Constituting more than mere instruments of war, they are deployed as markers of identity, whether identifying social distinctions (knights, nobles, foot soldiers) or cultural distinctions (Christians and Muslims). The author also considers the role of the Saracen in iconographic representation—winner or loser, superior or inferior. Heraldry is the focus of the second part, and we can well imagine its important function in identifying actors in an illuminated scene of war. This section includes a useful discussion on the crescent (a converse to the Christian cross). Caroff then proceeds to examine the representation of Muslim bodies, with a fascinating exploration of skin colour. Beards were also important motifs, and for many illuminators in the fifteenth century the hirsute face became the sole corporeal sign designating Muslim identity. Clothing, the focus of the fourth part, was a crucial iconographic marker of alterity, particularly the turban. Carloff traces the turban’s gradual development and iconographic shifts in illuminations across the period. In the final chapter, the author asks whether we can speak of ‘la mode orientale’, an oriental exoticism, born in this period? She argues that the ‘Saracen’ as represented in the sources is less ‘luxurious’, ‘oriental’, and ‘exotic’ than other personages of the medieval West’s repertoire of oriental personages. Ultimately, the illuminations present us with an adversary—the ‘ost des Sarrasins’ of the title, unsurprising given the crusade focus of the sources. A study of sources from Iberian or Italian contexts might present different findings, which makes the need for similar studies to Carloff’s all the more vital. At the end of the monograph is a wonderful catalogue of seventy illuminations with comprehensive commentary for each, very useful to readers, since Carloff frequently refers to specific illuminations in the body of her work. [End Page 262] Carloff’s work constitutes a much-needed contribution to scholarship on representations of alterity and race in medieval Christendom, standing alongside studies by medievalists such as John Tolan, Geraldine Heng, and Debra Higgs Strickland. Darren M. Smith The University of Sydney Copyright © 2020 Darren M. Smith

The fifteenth century Roman de Buscalus is dedicated to the duke of Burgundy Philip the Good. Its only nearly complete copy is contained in the manuscripts BnF, Fr. 9343-9344, which have been transcribed and illuminated in the workshop of the Wavrin Master. The text has until now been considered anonymous ; the author’s name cannot be found in the textual tradition. However, a body of evidence can be gathered from the BnF, Fr. 9343-9344, which allows to propose an authorial attribution to the clerk Jean Wauquelin, the duke’s writer. To mention the two most significant evidences : though the first folio of the copy is mutilated, the remaining fragments of the prologue bear striking resemblance with the beginning of works attributed with certainty to Jean Wauquelin, especially the Chroniques de Hainaut. Secondly, what’s left of the dedication miniature painted by the Wavrin Master can be linked with other miniatures ordered by Wauquelin, in particular the famous frontispiece painted by Rogier van der Weyden to illustrate the Chroniques de Hainaut.

Figure intellectuelle majeure de l’Autriche contemporaine, Robert Menasse n’a cessé de dénoncer depuis la fin des années 1980 les non-dits sur lesquels s’est édifiée la Seconde République. Schubumkehr (1995), troisième volet de sa Trilogie der Entgeisterung, s’inscrit dans la lignée des romans autrichiens du «désastre de la province». Menasse y observe les soubresauts d’une bourgade située à la frontière tchèque, de janvier 1989 à l’ouverture du Rideau de fer en décembre de la même année. Village de la «province profonde» perdue «dans un pays lui-même si profondément provincial», Komprechts devient le laboratoire de cette identité autrichienne complexe qui est au coeur des nombreux essais de Robert Menasse. Satire féroce du tourisme comme facteur de destruction identitaire, le roman offre par ailleurs une version parodique, à l’échelle locale, de la culture autrichienne du consensus et propose une réflexion originale sur le rapport d’une communauté tout entière à son passé.