Les apocryphes dans les recueils d’exempla : traces, réécritures et diffusion

Abstract

Since the 13th century, in their sermons ad populum the preachers used the homiletic exempla founded in diverse types of materials, among which the apocrypha. On the base of Welter’s studies (L’exemplum dans la littérature didactique et religieuse du Moyen Age), we have searched in the collections of exempla which apocrypha were chosen and how they were rewritten in order to be integrated into the didactic process of the collection of exempla. We also have examined how two main intellectual tools for the preachers : Vincent de Beauvais’Speculum historiale and Jacques de Voragine’s Legenda aurea have treated the apocrypha. Then we have focussed our attention on the way the dominican Étienne de Bourbon takes or rejects the apocrypha in his De diversis materiis praedicabilibus and how an anonymous author turns them into vernacular narrations and pictures in the Ci nous dit.