French consistories

A review of several origin myths relating to the creation of medieval Occitan lyric poetry. We see a preference for a "great man theory" of origins, though the "great man" may be a fictional woman. Medieval and Renaissance Occitan authors, including Uc de Saint Circ, Guilhem Molinier, and Jean de Nostredame, used differing origin myths to validate literature in a language that was perceived not to carry the prestige of twelfth-and thirteenth-century Latin or fifteenth-and sixteenth-century French.

A review of several origin myths relating to the creation of medieval Occitan lyric poetry. We see a preference for a “great man theory” of origins, though the “great man” may be a fictional woman. Medieval and early Renaissance Occitan authors, including Uc de Saint Circ, Guilhem Molinier, and Jean de Nostredame, used differing origin myths to validate literature in a language that was perceived not to carry the prestige of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Latin or fifteen- and sixteenth-century French.

Cet article analyse un court traité consacré par le pasteur réformé français Guillaume Houbraque à la discipline ecclésiastique et à l'excommunication. Ce texte rare n'a jamais fait l'objet d 'un examen approfondi. Or, rédigé en 1567, dans le contexte des controverses provoquées par le traité De la discipline et police Chrestienne (1562) de Jean Morély, il éclaire l'existence, au sein des Églises réformées françaises durant cette période , d'une troisième voie, peu examinée par ! 'historiographie, entre le «modèle» genevois de discipline ecclésiastique et les idées de Morély en la matière. Ni aussi «aristocratique» qu 'à Genève, ni aussi «démocratique» que chez Morély, cette troisième voie considère que si la discipline doit être exercée par le Consistoire, l'assemblée paroissiale doit pouvoir consentir à ses décisions et possède par conséquent un droit d 'intervention dans la procédure.

Le n° 30 de l'actuelle rue de la Madeleine est l'un des principaux vestiges du temple de la Calade à Nîmes, l'un des plus grands de son temps. Son porche qui ouvrait sur un couloir débouchant à l'intérieur de ce lieu de culte a vu passer les principaux membres de l'Église réformée de la ville. La maison donnant sur la rue appartenait à une famille, les Bonijol, dont sont issus plusieurs anciens, ce qui lui valut sans doute d'échapper à la destruction. La qualité de sa construction initiale tout au moins de sa façade, lui permit de traverser le temps, ce qui n'a pas été le cas de la maison du consistoire ni de l'académie situées entre la cour intérieure et le mur du temple qui ont fait l'objet d'importants remaniements. C'est sans doute un des lieux les plus denses, mais aussi les plus méconnus de la mémoire protestante nîmoise ( ). © Ph. Chareyre.

Les guinguettes sont aujourd'hui érigées en symbole de la tradition française populaire. Alors que les divers acteurs militent pour leur renouveau et contribuent à leur re-création, d'autres s'y rendent tous les dimanches pour assouvir leur passion de la danse, sous le regard fasciné du public de passage. Ce livre analyse les différentes manières de vivre la guinguette. Dans une interaction constante entre images, fiction et réalité, plusieurs stratégies permettent de la rendre conforme aux rêves de chacun et crédible en tant que pratique spontanée, conviviale et authentique.

In 18th century Geneva, three protagonists of social control endeavour to cope with the phenomenon of illegitimate births. Giving evidence of the State monopoly on sexual morality of Geneva people, the “Petit Conseil” punishes any relation outside wedlock resulting in a illegitimate pregnancy through the proceedings for “paillardise” : seeking systematic prosecution, the “Conseil” punishes deviant behaviours and attributes the child’s care to one of the parents judicially. The latter undertake strategies to avoid punishment and shame caused by the illegitimate birth, which leads to the intervention of the ministers and that of the “Hôpital Général” about the proceedings. The ministers assume a key role at the time of the baptism in discovering individuals who attempt to make their natural child be registered as legitimate. As for the institution, it often inquires into suspicious births on its own initiative in order to prevent child abandonment, by negotiating a certain amount of money that enables it to take over the bastard’s care permanently. Highlighting the mechanisms of this control and the interaction between actors, this article seeks to underline its contradictory aims : the protection of public finances as well as that of the bastard’s life.

Le code de la propriété intellectuelle n'autorisant, aux termes de l'article L.122-5, 2' et 3' a, d'une part, que les «copies ou reproductions strictement réservées à l'usage privé du copiste et non destinées à une utilisation collective » et, d'autre part, que les analyses et les courtes citations dans un but d'exemple et d'illustration, «toute représentation ou reproduction intégrale ou partielle faite sans le consentement de l'auteur ou de ses ayants droit ou avants cause est illicite>> (art. L.122-4). Cette représentation ou reproduction, par quelque procédé que ce soit, constituerait donc une contrefaçon sanctionnée par les articles L. 335-2 et suivants du code de la propriété intellectuelle .

Sixteenth-century Dutch Reformed ecclesiastical laws in the 1560s were modeled after the French example. This relationship can be explored more easily now that Philip Benedict and Nicolas Fornerod have published an excellent edition of all documents relating to the developments in the French Reformed churches and their polity in the crucial period 1557-1563. In France the Reformed adapted the Genevan liturgy and ecclesiastical laws into an organization feasible in and relevant to their situation, also merging them with local customs. In their turn for the Dutch Reformed – and not only for them – the French churches became the point of reference. In this regard it is telling that several Dutch ministers had at their deposal a collection of French documents, not only the decisions of to the French national synods, but even those taken at provincial synods. Their collections are still relevant as some of the documents they collected were not preserved in France. (Review in Dutch)

Les trois dernières guerres de religion, dites de Rohan, furent en Languedoc dans la décennie 1620, bien plus violentes que celles de la fin du siècle précédent, et marquèrent profondément l'identité protestante méridionale. Elles s'achevèrent par la paix d'Alès, dont les clauses furent restreintes par l'édit de Nîmes de juillet 1629, qui ôta définitivement aux huguenots toute capacité de résistance militaire 1 . Cette période voit le retour des pasteurs sur le devant de la scène, bien plus souvent porteurs d'une « politique prophétique », que véritables « prophètes armés » selon les définitions récemment formulées par Philip Benedict 2 . Ces temps d'extrêmes violences, de résistances désespérées sont particulièrement bien documentés, notamment par des chroniques qui furent rédigées pour la plupart par des protestants favorables à l'ordre royal qui livrant, chacun à partir de leur ville, leur version des évènements.

The creative reception of troubadour lyric in post-medieval poetry constitutes a phenomenon of noteworthy and continuing development throughout the centuries especially in southern France, the very region which well before any other European country produces –  from the origins of the early modern to Romanticism – a new Medievalism, characterized by a deeply-rooted rediscovery of its own literary heritage. This literary and cultural trend asserts itself both at an artistic level, with the reinvention of the troubadours’ metrical and thematic devices, and at an ideological level, with a strong sense of linguistic commonality which fosters difficult issues of competition between the literature in the Provençal mother-tongue and the homogenizing power of the French language’s and government’s centralizing influence.
Jean de Nostredame (1522-1577) and Frédéric Mistral (1830-1914) represent the two poles of this development, the first being responsible for the first, 16th-century Renaissance provençale and Mistral embodying in the second half of the 19th century the life and soul of the second Renaissance provençale. Nostredame and Mistral are ideally connected by the so-called “Ossian d’Occitanie”, that is Antoine Fabre d’Olivet (1767-1825), a multifaceted figure who draws together Nostredame’s poetic revival and the applications of the then nascent Provençal Philology under the rubric of a neo-troubadourism adapted to the literary taste of his time.
Thus, Jean’s Vies de plus célèbres et anciens poètes provençaux (Lyon 1575) is the first anthology containing troubadour vidas (translated into French) and poems (adapted to modern Provençal), intermingled for encomiastic purposes with Nostredame’s own poetical and historical inventions. In the context of the literary heritage of the Troubadours and southern France, Jean’s work is extremely important for the rediscovery and circulation of old Provençal Literature after centuries of oblivion. Fabre d’Olivet, who owned a copy of Nostredame’s Vies, shares with his predecessor the same fascination for the Provençal language, the interest in Middle Ages and a certain reliance upon literary “fakes” to create his own Troubadour. Poésies occitaniques du XIIIe siècle (1803-1804), a collection of supposedly original troubadour songs, which are in fact Fabre’s own imitations of troubadour poems.
The fusion of these poetic and political “rediscoveries” finds its most definitive shape in the works of Frédéric Mistral, an advocate of southern French literary heritage and a poet in his own right (Nobel Prize for Literature, 1904). Mistral expands the “mythe” of a Provence in step with the current literary debates and, at the same time, profoundly conscious of its models: the troubadours. Among Mistral’s remarkably vast production I will limit myself to examples from Calendau, in which the biographies of the troubadours are recalled in images reproduced on the “historiated dishes” owned by the hero; from Mireio, in which the Comtessa de Dia plays the role of the president of one of those Cours d’Amour invented by Nostredame and recycled by Fabre; and from Nerto, in which the moral education of the teenaged main character develops through the reading of Matfre Ermengau’s Breviari d’Amor.

This article, which was delivered as the 20th Ernest Gellner Lecture at the LSE in 2013, attempts to map the relations between nation-building processes in 19th-century Europe and city cultures with their urban sociability. Three patterns are surveyed: [1] the modernnational assimilation of medieval and early-modern city cultures (sample case: Orléans and the French cult of Joan of Arc); [2] the modular replication across cities of urban festivals as cultural mobilizers (sample case: the spread of Floral Games festivals in Southern France and Northern Spain); [3] the reticulation of city-based practices into a nationwide and nationbuilding network (sample cases: the role of choral societies in German cultural nationalism; and its transnational knock-on effect in the Baltic Provinces). By choosing the city as our social focus and placing it (or rather, its ideal-type 'Urbania') alongside Gellner's ideal-types of 'Megalomania' and 'Ruritania', we can avoid the finalism of studying regionalist and nationalist movements in the analytical framework of the post-Versailles state system, and we gain a better understanding of the granulated, localized social basis of such movements and the translocally homogenizing role of culture.

When the exile churches were established in London in 1550 by letters patent granted by Edward VI, the church order drawn up by the Polish Reformer Johannes à Lasco instituted a system of ecclesiastical discipline in order to maintain the sanctity of the Lord's Supper, in which the ultimate sanction was excommunication. During the 1560s, this power came to rest with the local diocesan bishops who acted as the Superintendents of these churches. Th is essay considers how the system of excommunication evolved and came to be exercised by the episcopate, as well as the extent to which the sentence was used in the disciplinary procedures of the exile churches during the later sixteenth century. 1

The separation of philosophy from literature and vice-versa is an aspect of early twentieth century intellectual sclerosis that affected a particular region of the globe. I am, of course, referring to the British/American school of philosophy otherwise known as analytic philosophy-or the logico-linguistic turn in philosophy begun by Russell, Lewis, Strawson and others, based on a faith in the universal Truth of pure reason critiqued by their own god, Kant. Therefore, that contemporary French philosopher, Alain Badiou, would have to invent the term "inaesthetics" to refer to the inextricable relation between philosophy and literature, only demonstrates how far we have strayed from the course first paved by Plato twenty-five hundred years ago-a course that continued well into the nineteenth century and twentieth century with thinkers like Nietzsche and Sartre. Nietzsche, for instance, began his academic career not a philosopher but as a classical philologist, whose innovative and insightful work on ancient Greek and Latin literature, earned him a reputation as the most promising philologist of his time. Fortunately for us--and if we take Nietzsche"s at his words, fortunately for him as well--this rising young star of philology who secured a tenured position at the University of Basel before completing his doctoral dissertation, became a meteoric falling star, tumbling down to earth in luminescent fire, with the controversial publication of his first book, The Birth of Tragedy.

On ne peut évoquer les liens entre le commerce, le travail et la religion sans faire référence au célèbre ouvrage de Max Weber qui introduit un lien direct entre le développement du capitalisme et l'implantation de la Réforme calviniste. Cette brillante démonstration qui a été depuis nuancée vient néanmoins souligner les modifications de la relation au travail et à l'argent qui accompagnent cette nouvelle théologie et les pratiques qu'elle induit 1 .

La coexistence d'après les registres des consistoires méridionaux », actes de la journée d'étude de Lyon, La coexistence confessionnelle à l'épreuve. Etudes sur les relations entre protestants et catholiques dans la France Moderne, coll. « Chrétiens et Sociétés. Documents et mémoires » n°9, LARHA, Lyon III, 2009, p. 73-88. Se reporter à la publication pour la pagination définitive.