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The written was the world of early medieval Iberia. Literacy was limited, but textuality was extensive, in the authority conferred on text and the arrangements made to use it. Roman inheritance is manifest, in documentary and legal culture, engendering literate expectations which define the period; continuity across conquest by Visigoths and Arabs, and the weakness of states in the north of the Peninsula, must lay to rest the traditional coupling of literacy with politics which underlies the paradigm of the Middle Ages. Between the eighth and eleventh centuries, as estates expanded to surmount locality and enter communities which had made do with memory, engagement with documentation was incentivized for the laity. Organization to do so followed, at one remove: the person of the scribe, who wrote the charter and recorded all those involved in and present at it, before recycling the text back into the community by public reading. The scribe mediated the text, and as his occupation consolidated he became more fully a literate interpreter. The charter, once created, had an active afterlife of dynamic circulation, enabled by multiple and accessible archives, particularly in the hands of the clergy. Written evidence was the surest defence in case of dispute; charters were self-promoting in their mutual citation as well as practical efficacy. But they also diffused legal knowledge: as each rhetorical, pragmatic, silent, and legislative reference to written law was read aloud by the scribe, how to capitalize on its provisions became better known, so kings and counts seized the potential. For the clergy, the Bible, canon law, and monastic rules were the texts which bestowed identity, but as they interacted with the laity, they set the charter in the history of salvation, and modelled textuality to society, as their monasteries became the microcosms of its written framework.

Bien qu’il ait inspiré des contemporains plus célèbres, tels François Rabelais et Clément Marot, et fréquenté des humanistes de premier plan, bien qu’il soit l’auteur d’une forme de tragédie latine inédite et maintes fois rééditée, et d’une chronique du règne de Louis XII connue des historiens, le poète néo-latin Nicolas Barthélemy de Loches est resté parfaitement méconnu. Il est ainsi nécessaire de rassembler, corriger et compléter les données dont on peut disposer sur ce personnage et ses oeuvres, mais aussi de reconstituer le cadre social, littéraire et historique dans lequel il a vécu et composé, afin de réévaluer la diversité et la richesse poétique de ses oeuvres. Ces données suffisent à montrer que les écrits de Barthélemy ne sont pas ceux d’un moine cloîtré, mais bien plutôt ceux d’un véritable humaniste engagé dans les réformes de son temps, qu’elles soient pédagogiques, monastiques ou évangéliques. L’édition d’un des recueils poétiques de Barthélemy les plus représentatifs de sa production littéraire (le recueil varié paru à Paris en 1520) vient nourrir et confirmer cette lecture. / Although he inspired famous contemporaries like François Rabelais or Clément Marot, and spent time with leading humanists, although he wrote a new Latin tragedy form many times reprinted and a chronicle about the reign of Louis XII familiar to historians, very little is known about the Neo-Latin poet Nicolas Barthélemy de Loches. Collecting, correcting and completing existing data about the man and his writings is necessary, as well as the reconstruction of the social, literary and historical environment in which he lived and wrote, in order to reevaluate the poetic diversity and richness of his work. Such data are enough to show that Barthélemy’s works were not written by a cloistered monk, but rather by a true humanist involved in the pedagogical, monastic and evangelical reforms of his time. The edition of one of the most representative poetic collections written by Barthélemy (a varied collection printed in 1520 in Paris) supports and confirms this interpretation.