À chaque saint sa chandelle. Pour un calendrier ludique

In addition to a saint's biography which establishes his or her power to heal people or save them from danger, the saint's attributes are also inscribed phonetically in his or her name. Thus, Saint Marguerite is linked to childbirth because she came from the belly of a dragon, but also because the term guérit [heals] is inescapably and forever inscribed in her name. This article, which is an offshoot of research for the Dictionnaire des locutions en moyen français, examines in alphabetical order the process of lexical creation in the names of approximately one hundred real or imaginary popular saints.RésuméAu delà du trait biographique d'où un saint tire son pouvoir de guérir ou de sauver d'un danger, sa qualité est aussi inscrite phonétiquement dans son nom. Ainsi, on lie sainte Marguerite à l'enfantement car elle est sortie du ventre du dragon, mais en même temps le terme guérit est inscrit d'une manière stable et incontournable dans son nom. Cet article, fruit d'une enquête menée en marge du Dictionnaire des locutions en moyen français, examine le processus de création verbale dans le nom d'une centaine de saints populaires, réels ou imaginaires, présentés par ordre alphabétique

Mumpsimus and Sumpsimus : the intellectual origins of a Henrician bon mot

Henry VIII's appearance before the assembled houses of parliament on Christmas Eve 1545 was perhaps his finest hour. In what has been called a ‘pioneer royal Christmas broadcast’, the king delivered an impassioned and eloquent speech lamenting the religious divisions that afflicted his kingdom, and urging his subjects towards unity and charity. 1 According to William Petre, the king himself wept as he recounted how ‘charity between man and man is so refrigerate’, and few of his audience could restrain themselves from doing likewise. 2 Another eye-witness, the chronicler Edward Hall, wrote down the speech ‘worde for worde, as near as I was able to report it’. This account gives details of how Henry illustrated the breakdown of fraternal love among his people: ‘the one calleth the other Hereticke and Anabaptist, and he calleth hym again, Papist, Yypocrite and Pharisey’; rival preachers inveighed against each other ‘without charity or discrecion’. To the king's mind, the blame for this deserved to be apportioned to all sides, and, to reinforce the point, Henry brought forward one of the more curious metaphors of contemporary religious discourse: ‘some be to styff in their old Mumpsimus, other be to busy and curious in their newe Sumpsimus’. 3 Recent historians of the reign have understandably devoted considerable attention to his speech, arguably the most famous of all Henry VIII's public pronouncements, and most have quoted the mumpsimus–sumpsimus idiom, with varying degrees of wry amusement. 4 Yet there has been little attempt to explain why the king should use precisely these words to epitomise the polarisation of religious positions in the early 1540s. 5 It is not always apparent from modern accounts that the terms ‘mumpsimus’ and ‘sumpsimus’ did not represent the king's own assay at faux-bucolic neologism, but were an established (though not long-established) literary trope. In the following short discussion, I hope to demonstrate how an investigation of the derivation and precedents of the phraseology employed by Henry in his Christmas speech can throw some revealing light on the processes by which religious typologies were constructed and utilised in the course of the Henrician Reformation, as well as providing some points of orientation in that most formidable of terrae incognitae, the mind of Henry VIII himself. 6 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Footnotes 1 The phrase is Diarmaid MacCulloch's: Thomas Cranmer: a life, New Haven–London 1996, 348. 2 PRO, SP 1/212, fos 110v–11r (Letters and papers, foreign and domestic, of the reign of Henry VIII, ed. J. S. Brewer, J. Gairdner and R. H. Brodie, London 1862–1910 [hereinafter cited as LP], xx/2, 1030). 3 E. Hall, Hall's Chronicle, ed. H. Ellis, London 1809, 864–5. The charge of religious name-calling was hardly new in 1545. In an earlier exhortation to unity and charity, Thomas Starkey had lamented the fact that ‘eche one in hart iugeth other to be eyther pharisee or heretyke, papist or schismatike’: An exhortation to the people instructynge them to unitie and obedience, London ?1536, fo. 27v. 4 J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, London 1968, 470–1; S. E. Lehmberg, The later parliaments of Henry VIII 1536–1547, Cambridge 1977, 229–31; S. Brigden, London and the Reformation, Oxford 1989, 378; G. R. Elton, England under the Tudors, 3rd edn, London 1991, 200; C. Haigh, English reformations: religion, politics, and society under the Tudors, Oxford 1993, 164; R. Rex, Henry VIII and the English Reformation, Basingstoke 1993, 172; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 348; G. W. Bernard, ‘The making of religious policy, 1533–1546: Henry VIII and the search for the middle way’, Historical Journal xli (1998), 348. 5 The exception here is Lehmberg, Later parliaments, 231, which notes that the phrase was derived from a 1517 treatise by Richard Pace. As I shall show, this does not give the complete picture. 6 For two recent stimulating, though contrasting, attempts to locate Henry's religious centre of gravity see Bernard, ‘The making of religious policy’; D. MacCulloch, ‘Henry VIII and the reform of the Church’, in D. MacCulloch (ed.), The reign of Henry VIII: politics, policy and piety, Basingstoke 1995, 159–80

Construire la norme des métiers de santé au Parlement de Paris (xive-début du xvie siècle)

Comment les procès engagés à la fin du Moyen Âge par les médecins, les chirurgiens et les barbiers parisiens contre des thérapeutes sans reconnaissance officielle transforment-ils l’ordre social des mondes de santé et renforcent-ils les métiers en formation ? Croiser l’étude des sources de la pratique judiciaire du Parlement de Paris et celle des sources normatives permet de dégager quelques pistes d’analyse. À l’occasion des procédures engagées devant le Parlement, les praticiens réguliers sont mis à l’épreuve par les avocats de leurs adversaires qui développent un discours alternatif sur les normes sociales de santé, et défendent une interprétation du droit qui leur est favorable. Confrontés aux irréguliers et à leurs revendications, les praticiens réguliers profitent de l’arène judiciaire pour renforcer leur autorité par un travail de communication sur la discipline des pratiques de santé et sur la loi du roi ; ils contribuent aussi au renforcement de leur contrôle des pratiques en mobilisant les potentialités réglementaires du Parlement. Le processus de dispute est dès lors un moment crucial d’élaboration des normes de comportement et d’ajustement de la norme juridique aux demandes sociales des communautés « professionnelles » en formation.How did legal proceedings brought by Parisian physicians, surgeons and barbers against unrecognised healers at the end of the Middle Ages change the field of health practices and reinforce the developing « professional » communities ? The study of judicial sources, the registers of the Paris Parlement, combined with the study of normative sources enables us to single out avenues of reflection. On the occasion of proceedings at the Parlement, the lawyers of the unauthorized practitioners elaborate alternative discourses about health-related social norms and advocate for an interpretation of the law that may be beneficial to them. In these ordeals, recognised practitioners take the opportunity of the judicial arena to strengthen their authority by imposing their discipline in the field of health and the king’s law. They contribute to the reinforcement of their control of the practices by using the regulatory power of the Parlement. The disputing process provides key moments to promote standards of behaviour and to adapt legal norm to the social demands from « professional » communities in the process of defining themselves

Investigating connections among reading, writing, and language development: A multiliteracies perspective

This study explores relationships among reading literature, creative writing, and language development in a university-level advanced French grammar course through the theoretical lens of the multiliteracies framework. The goal is to investigate reading-writing connections and whether these literacy practices facilitate students’ understanding and use of resources such as grammar, vocabulary, genre, and style. Qualitative and quantitative findings show that students recognize reading-writing connections and their contribution to language development; they perceive reading and writing as contributing to their understanding of language and text-based features; and they can apply to varying degrees textual resources learned through reading to creative writing tasks. The implications of these findings lend support to a growing body of research that explores the feasibility and outcomes of literacy-based approaches to teaching and learning in university-level foreign language contexts that have as their goal development of students’ advanced foreign language competencies

Montaigne et ses représentations : un « gibier » pour l’historien ?

Cette communication analyse les usages critiques que l’historien peut faire de Montaigne. Après avoir présenté les éléments qui font des écrits montaigniens un ensemble de sources idéales, l’article se centre sur la mobilisation de ces textes par des travaux relevant de l’histoire culturelle (histoire des mentalités puis histoire des représentations). Sont exposés les écueils auxquels se trouve confronté l’historien qui s’appuie sur Montaigne ainsi que les conclusions auxquelles il peut parvenir.In this article I define and analyze the historian’s critical understanding of Montaigne. After presenting various elements that transform Montaigne’s writings into a set of ideal sources, I then focus on the application of these texts in the fields of cultural history, history of mentalities, and finally history of representations. The pitfalls that historians find themselves facing when addressing Montaigne in this way are exposed, along with the conclusions they can reach

Un recueil de 1626, comprenant trois ouvrages en rapport avec la thématique du temps

Dernière page du premier ouvrage et page de titre du second. Cliché Jean-Pierre Rosenkranz Cette réunion de trois livrets produits par un même imprimeur strasbourgeois, tous trois en rapport avec la thématique du temps, a quelque chose d’exceptionnel. Il s’agit, au moins pour deux d’entre eux, de documents de caractère éphémère, issus des presses de Marx van der Heyden, imprimeur actif à Strasbourg de 1616 à 1637 auprès des graveurs Jacob et Isaac van der Heyden. Le premier est un calendrier..

Michel Nostradamus: el triunfo del verso jeroglífico

Producción CientíficaCada pocos años aparece alguien anunciando el definitivo fin del mundo. La última ocasión, para los agoreros, ha sido el pasado 2012, apoyada en una denominada profecía maya, que, ella sí, ha conseguido ascender a la Nada. Aunque quizás sea precipitado decir que la profecía maya haya desaparecido para siempre, porque una de las propiedades más notables de vaticinadores y futurólogos es la capacidad de reinterpretar. Viven de lo inconcreto y la esencia de la profecía es, precisamente, la imponderabilidad y la posibilidad de multi-interpretación que ofrece a hombres y mujeres, letrados e iletrados. Profetizar es presumir de que se sabe lo que va a pasar en el futuro y no se entiende muy bien por qué todos los profetizadores hablan en lenguaje hermético, en el del gran Hermes Trismegisto, que Enrique Jardiel Poncela traducía a expresarse en camelo ¿Temor a que la humanidad sea dominada por el pánico conociendo lo que va a pasar? ¿Es más humano dejar que perezcamos mientras estamos entretenidos resolviendo un crucigrama

Philippe Frieden, La lettre et le miroir. Écrire l’histoire d’actualité selon Jean Molinet

En choisissant pour titre Écrire l’histoire d’actualité, Ph. Frieden définit à la fois la problématique et le corpus de son étude. La définition du rôle de l’“historien” à la fin du Moyen Âge ne pouvant ignorer les pièces (rondeaux, ballades, dits, prosimètres…) qui ne relèvent pas à proprement parler de l’historiographie, mais bien d’une écriture de “circonstance” politique ou courtisane, c’est l’ensemble de l’œuvre de Jean Molinet qu’il s’agit de prendre en compte afin de définir cette écri..