Responsables de l’atelier
Katherine ZIEMAN (Université de Poitiers)
Colette STEVANOVICH (Université de Lorraine)
| Vladimir AGRIGOROAEI ● Université de Poitiers Emancipated Texts: Anglo-Norman and Middle English in Medieval Biblical Interaction |
Résumé
The paper examines the vernacular translation and adaptation of the Bible in the Middle Ages as a form of intellectual emancipation, focusing on the interaction between Old French (in its Anglo-Norman variety) and Middle English. It concentrates on thirteenth century contexts in which biblical material circulated across linguistic boundaries in a multilingual environment. The analysis draws on examples from the Sermons of Maurice of Sully, the Kentish Sermons, the Surtees Psalter, two Old French metrical psalters, as well as late avatars of the Anglo-Norman Oxford Psalter, etc. Particular attention is paid to how texts shift between languages and literatures through transfer or symbiosis. The study is based on data produced within the PSalteRATIO project, which provides a systematic corpus for tracing these interactions. By focusing on concrete cases, the paper aims to clarify how vernacular biblical materials functioned within religious communities and how linguistic interaction shaped their transmission and use.
| Carole BAUGUION ● Université Catholique de l’Ouest S’émanciper en captivité : la poétique libératoire de Charles d’Orléans dans les formes brèves moyen-anglaises |
Résumé
Orphelin à quatorze ans, Charles, comte d’Angoulême (1394-1465), est émancipé le 10 décembre 1408 par lettre du roi Charles VI l’autorisant à succéder au duché d’Orléans. Affranchi de toute tutelle royale, il se voit investi du gouvernement d’un vaste héritage seigneurial et du droit de réclamer justice pour l’assassinat de son père, Louis d’Orléans. Cette première émancipation, strictement juridique, ne constitue pourtant que le prélude à un destin contrarié : devenu captif à Azincourt en 1415, le jeune duc entreprend une lente reconquête de sa liberté par l’écriture.
Aborder la notion d’émancipation chez un prisonnier exilé pendant près d’un quart de siècle pourrait relever du paradoxe. Pourtant, tout au long de sa captivité en terre ennemie, Charles d’Orléans détourne les codes de la fin’amor pour élaborer une poétique profondément personnelle. Sa poésie, rimée en moyen-anglais, relève d’une forme de journal intime : elle oscille entre temps historique et temps vécu, sans presque aucune datation, et donne accès aux mouvements d’une conscience en quête d’identité et d’autonomie. Sous les apparences d’une galanterie chevaleresque, il développe une poétique de l’instant, fondée sur l’introspection et sur l’affirmation progressive d’un je et d’un moi libératoires, « En la forest d’Ennuyeuse Tristesse » / « In the forest of noyous hevynes ».
Cette communication se propose d’examiner comment les poésies moyen-anglaises, composées en captivité et en exil, construisent une forme d’émancipation intérieure et scripturaire – une véritable poétique libératoire – en dépit de la contrainte politique, spatiale et temporelle. L’analyse portera sur un corpus de formes brèves en moyen-anglais conservées dans le manuscrit Harley 682 de la British Library, en interrogeant les procédés poétiques, lexicaux et symboliques par lesquels le prince-poète façonne, au fil des rimes, un moi individué, autonome et résilient.
| Agnès BLANDEAU ● Nantes Université Gregory Unchained : From Sin to Saintliness |
Résumé
The fourteenth-century Middle English poem The Legend of Pope Gregory, a combination of romance and saint’s life, recounts an exemplary repentance rewarded with divine forgiveness and the consecration of Gregory as the supreme head of Christendom. The storyline of the penitent’s misadventures and expiatory wanderings interwines themes familiar to medieval audiences of both chivalric romance and hagiography: the shameful secret of an irreparable fault, the ordeal of harrowing penance, and the miraculous intervention of God acknowledging Gregory’s successful liberation from sin. This eventful narrative of disgrace followed by grace resembles a colorful tapestry of interlaced motifs that enrich the meanings of the text and reveal its variations in tone. We propose a reading of the poem from a perspective other than that of guilt and atonement leading to salvation: Gregrory’s trying emancipation from the baleful fate to which his incestuous fathering and then his incestuous match threatened to doom him.
Bilbiographie
Champion, Pierre. Charles d’Orléans, poésies (1923), 2 vols., Paris : Champion, coll. « Classiques français du Moyen Âge », 1927. Ballade LXIII, vol. I.
Steele, Robert et Mabel Day, The English Poems of Charles of Orleans (1941), coll. « Early English Text Society», original series 215, 220, Londres : Oxford University Press, 1946.
| Oxana KHARLAMENKO ● Université de Tours Emancipation Through Grammar? Morphosyntactic Resolution of Gender Ambiguity in Ælfric’s Life of Saint Eugenia and the anonymous Life of Saint Euphrosyne |
Résumé
This paper explores how gender ambiguity is managed within the morphosyntactic system of Old English, using two saints’ lives—Ælfric’s Life of Saint Eugenia and the anonymous Life of Saint Euphrosyne—as comparative case studies. Both texts focus on women who adopt male monastic identities, producing moments where grammatical gender and social presentation diverge. Old English enforces overt agreement in gender between nouns, adjectives, determiners, and pronouns. These constraints pose challenges when narrating characters whose social roles shift across gender lines. This paper, therefore, investigates linguistic resources Old English deploy to maintain syntactic coherence in the face of referential instability. It subsequently tries to answer the question of ambiguity: how is ambiguity deferred, neutralized, or resolved—within clauses, across clauses, and in relation to broader discourse structures? Focusing on morphosyntactic detail, this study examines the use of pronominal reference, agreement patterns, and noun phrase structure to trace how grammatical gender is managed across the two texts. The comparison between Ælfric’s syntactically conservative Eugenia and the more variable Euphrosyne highlights contrasting approaches to referential stability.
Bibliographie
Acquaviva, Paolo. ‘Gender as a Property of Words and as a Property of Structures’. Catalan Journal of Linguistics 19 (December 2020): 49.
Audring, Jenny. ‘Gender Assignment and Gender Agreement: Evidence from Pronominal Gender Languages’. Morphology 18, no. 2 (2008): 2.
Baron, Naomi S. ‘A Reanalysis of English Grammatical Gender’. Lingua 27 (1971): 113–40.
Boucherie, M. (1996). The Anonymous Life of Saint Euphrosyne. SISMEL.
Corbett, Greville G. Gender. Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Hogg, R. M., & Fulk, R. D. (2011). A Grammar of Old English, vol. II: Morphology. Wiley-Blackwell.
Mitchell, B. (1985). Old English Syntax. Oxford University Press.
Godden, M. (2000). Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies. Oxford University Press.
Ælfric. Lives of Saints, ed. W. W. Skeat. EETS 76, 82, 94, 114 (1881–1900).
Thompson, M. (2019). “Gender and Translation in Ælfric’s Lives of Saints.” Anglo-Saxon England 48.
| Ariane LAINÉ ● Université d’Orléans Du recueil d’exempla au sermon prêché: émancipation ou conformité ? |
| Elisa MARCADET ● Université de Tours Copied or not copied? A preliminary study of the intertextual ties between the six versions of the Middle English Surtees Psalter |
Résumé
The Surtees Psalter, also known as the Northern Verse Psalter, is an early Middle English translation in verse from the Latin Vulgate. The text dates back to the 13-14th centuries and is extant in six manuscripts. When it comes to multiple versions of one medieval text, it is quite challenging to grasp the interrelations at play. For instance, in the Surtees‘ Cycle one may consider the following questions: were all the witnesses copied at the same moment of time, on more than one manuscript or on only one archetype, and if so, is the archetype one of the version still extant in our possession? Could it be that more than two were copied on a third one, at the exact same time, and others later on? Only a comprehensive study of the intertextual ties of the different versions could shed light on how the manuscripts are interconnected to one another, and how some of them are emancipating themselves from the textual tradition of the Surtees, thus creating sub-families within the family of manuscripts. This paper offers an entry point into this study, through the different levels of the text to see how the versions relate one to the others. On the one hand, it will look at the structure of the psalter (rhyme patterns, verse numbers) in the different versions, and on the other hand, it will analyse the various lexical choices from one version to the other, to highlight either linguistic connections or differences.
Bibliographie
MSS of the Surtees’ Cycle
Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS. Bodley 921
Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS. Bodley 425
Cambridge: Corpus Christi College, MS 278
London: British Library, MS. Egerton 614
London: British Library, MS. Harley 1770
London: British Library, MS. Cotton Vespasian D.7
Sutherland, Annie. English Psalms in the Middle Ages, 1300-1450. Oxford university press, 2015.
Middle English Dictionary. Ed. Robert E. Lewis, et al. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1952-2001. Online edition in Middle English Compendium. Ed. Frances McSparran, et al.. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Library, 2000-2018.
| Stephen MORRISON ● Université de Tours Released from the everlasting torments of Hell?? What the Hell are You Talking About? |
Résumé
Orthodox Christian thought and doctrine saw infernal punishment, resulting from unforgiven transgression, as eternal and immutable. Or did it always see it so? A number of asseverations, some from recognized orthodox sources, ranging chronologically from late Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages, suggest that this picture is not so clear-cut. In this paper, I will attempt to illustrate the nature and extent of this anomaly. The texts in question, in Latin (mainly), Italian and English, include a commentary on the three theological virtues, a saint’s life, sermons, a manual of popular religious instruction, and stories classified as belonging to folkloric traditions, together with the more illustrious likes of The Golden Legend, The Divine Comedy, and Langland’s Piers Plowman.
| Véronique SOREAU ● Université de Poiters Ecrits, mandataires et auteurs en marge : les multiples signes d’émancipations dans le manuscrit O.1.13. (Trinity College Library, Cambridge) |
Résumé
Le manuscrit O.1.13, miscellanée répertoriée sous l’intitulé Medica, renferme des textes scientifiques témoins d’émancipations sur une multitude de plans. Conseils de vie, traités d’astrologie médicale, recettes médicinales, charms et poèmes médicaux en moyen-anglais datant du quinzième et seizième siècle sont rassemblés en six livrets. Les inscriptions en marge de certains textes, notamment les signatures des deux plus grands alchimistes de l’Angleterre médiévale: John Dee et Thomas Norton, suggèrent le caractère sulfureux du manuscrit.
À but utilitaire, ces écrits portent la trace d’une tradition du maintien de la santé, souvent portée par les femmes au sein des familles dès le Moyen Age. Ainsi, de par ce rôle traditionnellement inscrit à la gente féminine, certaines ont pu y voir un moyen d’émancipation afin de se libérer d’une position d’infériorité. Citées dans le manuscrit, Jeanne de Valois et sa fille Philippa de Hainaut sont deux exemples de femmes qui ont participé à une diffusion plus large des connaissances médicales grâce à leur rôle de mandatrice et utilisatrices du traité sur le romarin. En effet, Þe lytil boke of þe vertuys of rosemaryne constitue la version la plus longue et la plus aboutie du traité. Ce texte unique célèbre les vertus d’une plante à part, véritable panacée.
Le livret porte la griffe d’Henry Daniel, praticien, auteur et traducteur de génie. Contrairement à ses contemporains qui mettaient tant d’opacité sur la science médicale ou philosophie naturelle, Henry Daniel eu la volonté de vulgariser ce savoir afin d’apporter un accès plus large aux soins médicaux. Il participa ainsi à l’alphabétisation et à l’émancipation de la population. À bien des égards, ce texte dénote l’aspect unique, précieux, et en marge, de par l’origine de sa création, de sa forme, et de son contenu.
| Colette STÉVANOVICH ● Université de Lorraine Le combat du roi Richard contre un lion : comment un rédacteur s’émancipe de son modèle |
Résumé
Le roman moyen-anglais Richard Cœur de Lion nous est parvenu dans plusieurs versions qui peu à peu, par ajouts successifs, construisent un récit s’éloignant de plus en plus de la vérité historique et même de la vraisemblance. Outre les petites différences d’orthographe ou de formulation naturelles dans la transmission manuscrite d’un texte, outre les ajouts d’épisodes entiers, le remanieur de la version a se livre à une fascinante réécriture de certains passages. Nous considérerons ici l’épisode où Richard, prisonnier du roi d’Allemagne, est livré à un lion, mais sauvé grâce à l’aide de la fille du roi. Les modalités du combat changent, ainsi que la manière dont Richard arrache le cœur du lion et ce qu’il en fait ensuite. Une comparaison avec des chroniques de différentes époques nous permettra d’évaluer le degré d’originalité du remanieur dans les modifications apportées à son modèle et les raisons qui ont pu l’amener à s’en émanciper.
| Tobias STOCKLER ● Université de Picardie Jules Verne Titre en attente |
| Martine YVERNAULT ● Université de Limoges Emancipation and Advice in John Gower’s O deus immense / O Boundless God and In Praise of Peace |
Résumé
From Latin emancipatio, the term « emancipation » – as opposed to « authority » – is connected to the formal coming of age period and it implies the individual acquirement of freedom « from legal, social, political, intellectual or moral restraint » (The Concise Oxford Dictionary). In both poems of unequal length (edition: R. F. Yeager, M. Livingston, 2005), Gower is writing for kings, in general, and specifically for Henry IV on the occasion of his coronation after Richard’s rule. He advocates peace in the sense of order and just government « in a moment of turbulent regnal transition through the medium of prophetic poetry » (E. Weiskott, « ‘Loquela gravis iuvat‘: Gower’s O deus immense and the Place of Poetry, 1398-1400″, 2023). In these poems meant to have the same aim as moral treatises and mirrors, Gower expatiates on the sense and precious value of peace, and his objective questions the issue of emancipation from sound, moral authorities that should guide kings as well as the relativity of individual freedom in the case of figures like Henry IV, « Dutiful King Henry, who was chosen by Christ » (Praise, incipit). This paper explores the essential role played by the king’s counsel striving to guide the ruler until he becomes his own advisor, thus reaching a form of emancipation. As Gower, in both poems, is invested with the role of advisor, the paper also broaches the ambiguous role of poetry in a political context, the rhetorical tools chosen by Gower to formulate his advice intended for Henry IV and future rulers, as well as the political limits that curb the freedom of expression of poets often defined as « princepleasers » (R. Firth Green, 1979) and forced to seek lucrative positions to make up for the mediocrity of their status in the case of poets belonging to minor orders (K. Kerby-Fulton, 2021).
| Katherine ZIEMAN ● Université de Poitiers Emancipation and Exemplarity: Margery Kempe as Public Contemplative |
Résumé
This paper will discuss the self-fashioning of the 15th-century mystic Margery Kempe. Rarely associated with restraint, Kempe’s special status as a chosen soul of God frequently manifested in public displays of devotion that drew all eyes and ears towards her. The sincerity of Kempe’s strident crying and weeping were paradoxically guaranteed by the very breaches of decorum that made them suspect to many. In this respect, Kempe was hardly a model saint, if by that we mean that she conformed to a model of sanctity portrayed in many a vita. Yet Kempe, I argue, was not striving for sainthood. She was, rather embracing a different category of sanctity that I have taken to calling the “public contemplative.” Whereas saints’ lives tend to iron out the idiosyncratic details of holy lives so that they conform to a model of sainthood, the lives of public contemplatives resist (or are emancipated from) such conformity. Rather than establish themselves as saints, they seek rather to be role models of more public and embodied forms of contemplation. While Kempe followed models, most notably Richard Rolle and Birgitta of Sweden (both public contemplatives in their own distinct ways), her authenticity was guaranteed as much by her departures from their models as it was by her embrace of such recognizable exemplars.