Cette thèse de doctorat, qui fait partie du projet des « Plus anciens documents linguistiques de la France », s’inscrit à la fois dans le domaine de la linguistique et dans celui de la philologie. L’étude lexicologique qu’elle propose est basée sur des documents d’archives du XIIIe siècle et s’accompagne de la transcription de deux corpus de chartes inédites. L’analyse détaillée de cinquante mots liés au champ lexical de l’agriculture, présentée sous forme de dossiers lexicologiques, constitue le noyau du travail. Les apports nouveaux que les dossiers permettent d’obtenir en matière de sens et de formes nouveaux, de réseau sémantique et d’étymologies corrigées sont présentés à la suite des dossiers. La méthode d’analyse intensive qu’ils adoptent fournit un complément indispensable à la lexicographie existante et sa méthode extensive. L’étude comporte en outre une réflexion sur le rôle des chartes vernaculaires dans l’élaboration et le changement linguistiques, à travers notamment le lexique. / This doctoral thesis studying the words related to agriculture in medieval charters is situated in the fields of historical linguistics and philology. It is part of the research project “The most ancient linguistic documents of France” and provides a transcription of two corpuses of charters as well as a lexicological study of 50 words related to agriculture. Each word is treated separately in an article including the word’s etymology, the different writings appearing in the charters, a semantic description, a short context of each occurrence, the information from the most important Old French dictionaries as well as a critique of the latter. The articles, forming the main part of the thesis, are followed by a chapter that sums up their results concerning new words or meanings, etymology, hyperonyms and (co)hyponyms. The words are thus studied in an intensive manner forming a complement to the extensive description provided by the dictionaries. The study also includes a reflection on the role the charters play in language elaboration through their vocabulary.

The diploma thesis An analysis of the history of French borrowings' pronunciation from Middle to Modern English on the basis of corpus data attempts to account for the influence of Old French borrowings and their pronunciation on the Middle English phonological system with respect to Modern English. The theoretical part of the thesis explains extralinguistic and intralinguistic aspects of language contact and the related lexical and phonological borrowing, which is followed by an overview of the history of the English and French phonological systems and complemented by the corresponding scribal practices. The research is carried out on a list of French loans extracted from and further studied in Oxford English Dictionary. Selected samples are looked up in a Middle English corpus and their probable pronunciation is inferred on the basis of their orthography. The analysis is concerned with five French phonemes absent in the medieval English.

This dissertation investigates the links between Chrétien de Troyes’ romance Le Chevalier au lion from the late twelfth century and the Old Swedish text Herr Ivan, written at the behest of Queen Eufemia of Norway at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The study has two parts. The first sets out to determine the sources of the Swedish text: Was Le Chevalier au lion really the source text of Herr Ivan? The second part raises the question of what happened to the courtly ideals that characterize the French romance when they were transferred into Swedish. The analysis of the question concerning the sources of Herr Ivan confirms that Le Chevalier au lion was the translator’s main source, while the Old Norse version Ívens saga, from the middle of the thirteenth century, was used as a secondary source. The relationship between Le Chevalier au lion, Ívens saga and Herr Ivan is examined through a comparison of the three texts: the choice of verse or prose, the role of prologues and epilogues, and the use of the voice of a narrator and of direct and indirect discourse. Four specific passages are compared at a micro-level. By comparing Herr Ivan to its sources, it becomes clear that the Swedish translator wanted to stress certain courtly ideals by presenting a distinct and coherent interpretation of what Chrétien de Troyes refers to as courtoisie. This indicates that the function of the text was to present a set of ideological and aesthetic values. The analysis of the transmission of courtly ideals takes its point of departure in the uses of the French word courtois and the Swedish equivalent hövisker. As a next step, three elements intimately linked to courtliness are examined: aventure, gaieté and honneur. Also the different roles played by the lion are highlighted. Finally, it is shown how the courtly ideals of Herr Ivan can be read in the light of the other Old Swedish texts written at the behest of Queen Eufemia: Hertig Fredrik av Normandie and Flores och Blanzeflor.

The immense scope of Sir Thomas Malory¡¦s Le Morte Darthur has long kept daunting his readers. In terms of space, Malory includes both historical locations and imaginary and unnamed natural locales in his work. These places have different functions and therefore transmit different dimensions of spatial imagination. This dissertation examines three kinds of space¡Xwater as space, urban space and mystical space, and the aesthetic relations to these spaces in Le Morte Darthur. These named spaces and the selected locations in each category will be analyzed in the framework of microspace and macrospace, a structure proposed by Dick Harrison in conceptualizing medieval spatial experiences. Chapter one explores water as space. Some geographical sites, such as harbors, lakes, wells and rivers, and an imaginary space of Lancelot¡¦s tears as a qualitative concept are discussed in relation to the aquatic regenerative power. Particular interests are in how Malory accentuates differences which water exhibits in these sites and how water functions as a link to the past and to the future via language and spatial verticality. The second chapter moves to urban space, localized in specific places. This chapter aims to explicate how some medieval cities in Le Morte Darthur are consecrated or deconsecrated as a result of the city¡¦s association with distinct social and moral/immoral activities. The final chapter discusses mystical space. The places of sojourn of the Grail knights during their quest are marked by spatial verticality and horizontality, in proportion to each knight¡¦s moral worthiness. These locales form a preparatory path towards the space where the Grail vision and a divine message are ultimately revealed. An analogy between the interior space of the Grail and the extracosmic void space is drawn in order to convey the essence of the Grail in spatial terms. The progression from chapter one to three reflects a tendency from the physical to the mystical world of the human existence imagined in Malory¡¦s work. Moral dimension plays an important role in that it enables the transformation from microspace to macrospace in some instances. The term ¡§aesthetic spaces¡¨ will include both microspace and macrospace, in which Malory employs real and imaginary sites to fulfill his aesthetic ideal. ¡§Aesthetic spaces,¡¨ when taken in a broader sense, will also apply to ¡§poetic space¡¨ when language results in the transference of space which characters experience. Three categories of texts will be employed in the discussion: literary, historical and theoretical texts. The first group includes Le Morte Darthur, some major medieval English romances and chronicles and the Old French prose Vulgate and Post-Vulgate Cycles; the second, fourteenth- and fifteenth-century philosophical, religious and historical documents; and the last, theories of medieval spatial thinking from Harrison and Mircea Eliade. Through comparisons of a number of passages in Le Morte Darthur and these two French versions, this writer attempts to show that Malory, as the first writer to incorporate the Grail narrative into Arthurian romance in England prior to the late fifteenth century, succeeds in presenting microspatial and macrospatial thinking in Le Morte Darthur.

This study examines the supposedly pejorative nature of the Germanic derived suffix -ard in French medieval words and their contemporary counterparts. The author looks at the words used in medieval writings available in the online database Frantext Moyen Français, which features texts dating from the year 1330 to 1502. The study reveals that while a large portion of the words ending in -ard in this database can be considered pejorative, a group of words does not carry this connotation, such as words referring to colours or objects. Some words were pejorative in Old French but have lost this connotation over time, while others have disappeared only to reappear centuries later with new meanings. The study also shows that -ard was used to form many types of words – nouns, verbs and adjectives – which take their derivation from several different languages (e.g. Latin, Dutch, Spanish etc.). Sometimes it also seems to appear without any obvious reason, for example when it replaces an already existing suffix. Because of the changeable nature of language, words carrying the ending -ard must be examined in the context in which they occur in order to be properly understood.

The present dissertation is a comparative investigation between the Germanic-like structural phenomena found in the left periphery of Old French (OF) clauses and the syntactic phenomena found in the left periphery of Old High German (OHG). The goal of this thesis is to provide evidence that only a synchronic analysis can explain the presence of Germanic-like structures in OF syntax. The reason for this lies in the similarities between the V2 properties found in OF and OHG. The two languages show V2 properties such as V-to-C movement and XP fronting, but also properties which are not found in Modern V2 languages such as a frequent V1 and V3 word order. The corpus I use consists of four OF texts from the 12th and 13th century which correspond to the late OF period. They are composed in different OF dialects from the northern part of France. The poetic texts chosen for this study are Le voyage de Saint-Brandan and Gormont et Isembart. The prose texts are Le Roman de Tristan en prose and Les Miracles de Saint Louis. I coded these OF documents according to certain criteria: main clause type, embedded clause type, finite verb position, first element preceding the finite verb, etc. The results indicate that OF can be considered a true V2-language that shares a certain amount of properties with OHG, namely V-to-C movement, XP fronting, Stylistic Fronting as well as verb-initial clauses. This thesis illustrates that the OF dialects closer situated to the Germanic language border show a higher frequency in Germanic-like syntactic phenomena than the dialects situated further away. A difference between poems and prose texts concerning the presence and intensity of certain syntactic phenomena can also be observed.

L'étude consacrée à Daurel et Beton consiste à décrire une forme poétique singulière, celle de la chanson de geste en langue d'oc du XIIe siècle. La recherche porte ainsi sur les ressources de la langue pour créer le matériau épique. Dans Daurel et Beton, en effet, la langue lyrique, la langue des troubadours, des poètes du Sud, devient la langue épique. Il nous faut donc saisir la vocation de notre poème : offrir le vécu immédiat de l'incantation sonore au public mis en présence de la langue poétique des origines, celle de la chanson de geste en langue d'oc qui naît à la littérature. De plus, dans Daurel et Beton, le jongleur, ordinairement cantonné aux motifs culturels et extradiégétiques, devient un personnage de premier plan dans le récit. L'analyse se place également sur le terrain de l'anthropologie et tente de saisir la dimension culturelle de l'oeuvre dans tous ses aspects, c'est-à-dire le fonctionnement de la société féodale perceptible au travers des situations du récit, la conception des rapports sociaux et plus généralement la vision de la sociabilité aristocratique, des rituels qui définissent les échanges humains au Moyen Âge. / Daurel et Beton is a chanson de geste written in old provencal, and a particular poetic form from the twelfth century. What are the resources to create the epic material ? Surely the lyric language : the forms are loud-sounding, full of matter, highly musical, and the chanson. quite different from those of Northern France, returns to the primary source of epics. Moreover, in Daurel et Beton, noteworthy is the fact that the jongleur exceeds the cultural and metalinguistic functions he fulfils usually in the genre and becomes a character of primary interest in the plot. Besides, this text deserves en anthropology investigation. i.e. how the feudal suciety is showned in tbe narratives situations, and which are the interactions between individuals in the Middle Ages society depicted in South Old French epics. Thus, it is possible to tackle the status of the epic imaginary bound to the poetic form, and to observe how genre and its style evolved int the South of France.

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L'hétérogénéité des tendances de la sculpture religieuse du XVIIe siècle dans le Nord-Pas-de-Calais reflète l'étendue et la diversité des régions qui le constituent. Ces départements sont un lieu de rencontre confrontant des oeuvres sculptées d'origine locale, régionale avec d'autres importées à partir d'autres centres des anciens Pays-Bas du Sud, de Paris ou de Picardie. La sculpture de qualité, liée au mobilier d'église, constitue l'essentiel de la production de cette époque et répondait aux orientations imposées par la réforme catholique. La révolution, les guerres ainsi que les changements de goût sont la cause principale de la perte d'une part considérable de ce patrimoine. Adam Lottman à Valenciennes, secondé par Jaspard Marsy à Cambrai s'imposent pour le Nord-Pas-de-Calais comme les meilleurs sculpteurs. Nous disposons d'éléments moins concrets sur d'autres sculpteurs, localement actifs, tels Antoine Liesse, Pierre Schleiff, Guillaume Tabaguet et Thomas Tieullier, pour ne citer que les plus importants. Au travers du siècle, la production régionale fut concurrencée par celle des sculpteurs anversois tels que Jean, Robert et André de Nole, Jacques Cocx ou Artus Quellin dit l'ancien et le jeune. Avec la conquête graduelle et définitive des régions, essentiellement par Louis XIV, s'installe une influence du classicisme français en sculpture, assuré en premier lieu par l'amiénois Nicolas Blasset. Ce n'est qu'à la fin du siècle qu'on retrouve des oeuvres d'autres Sculpteurs du Roi tels que François Girardon ou Jean Drouilly, au moment où les influences vont fusionner pour s'estomper au profit d'un style "français" porté par la puissance politique de la monarchie absolue. / Heterogeneity of the trends in religious sculpture of the XVIIth century in the Nord-Pas-de-Calaisreflects the extend and diversity of the regions of which these departments are made up. These departments are a meeting area where sculptural works of local and regional origin are facing comparison with imported sculptures from the Southern Low Countries, Paris or even Picardy. High quality sculptures, related to church furnishings, in keeping with the lines of conduct enforced by the Catholic Reform, make up the essential part of the production of that time. The French Revolution, wars and even changes in taste are the main causes of the loss of a considerable part of this cultural heritage. In the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, Adam Lottman at Valenciennes, assisted by Jaspard Marsy at Cambrai, are regarded as the best sculptors. Less concrete data are available on other artists such as Antoine Liesse, Pierre Schleiff, Guillaume Tabaguet and Thomas Tieullier, to mention only the most important ones. Throughout the century, the regional production was facing competition from Antwerp sculptors, such as Jan, Robert and André de Nole, Jacques Cocx or Artus Quellin the Older and the Younger. The gradual and final conquest of the regions, mainly by Louis XIV, established the influence of French classicism in sculpture, materialised primarily by Nicolas Blasset from Amiens. Not until the end of the century, at the time when influences start to merge and finally shrink into a "French" style, stimulated by the political power of the absolute monarchy, do we find worls of other "Royal Sculptors" (Sculpteurs du Roi) such as François Girardon and Jean Drouilly.