Conservés dans le chœur de l’abbaye Saint-Robert pour lequel ils furent crées, les douze panneaux de la tenture de La Chaise-Dieu mettent en scène les épisodes de la Vie du Christ et de la Vie de la Vierge, flanqués de leurs préfigures vétérotestamentaires. En outre, deux pièces indépendantes reproduisent plusieurs compositions évangéliques du cycle principal. De multiples blasons révèlent l’identité du commanditaire, Jacques de Saint-Nectaire, qui gouverne l’institution bénédictine de 1491 à 1518, soit dans le contexte historique de l’arrivée de la commende. Basée sur un matériel d’analyse exceptionnel, cette étude monographique propose une reconstitution de l’élaboration artistique de l’œuvre et tente de définir l’implication du commanditaire dans le projet initial, le degré de liberté des peintres et l’influence des lissiers sur le rendu final des tapisseries. Dans ce but, l’étude des modèles gravés et de leur utilisation lors de la réalisation des cartons à grandeur fait l’objet d’une attention particulière. En conclusion, ce travail apporte des hypothèses concernant le milieu d’origine des artistes et la localisation de leurs ateliers. / As one of the most spectacular cycle of medieval tapestries preserved, the fourteen woven panels of La Chaise-Dieu - for most of them still hanging in the choir of Saint-Robert church (Auvergne/France) - depict episodes of Jesus and Mary’s life along with scenes extracted from the Old Testament. Their many blazons have always identified their patron with Jacques de Saint-Nectaire, abbot of the Benedictine institution from 1491 to 1518. Thanks to the tremendous group of evidences offered by this unique set, this research challenges the general assumptions of the elaboration of tapestries, introducing a new insight about the distinctive roles played by the patron, the master painter, his assistants and the weavers. A particular importance has been lent to the study of the engravings used as patterns. As a conclusion, this work aims to provide some hypothesis regarding the artists’ origins and their workshops’ location.

This dissertation challenges the standard view that fifteenth-century poets wrote irregular meters in artless imitation of Chaucer. On the contrary, I argue that Chaucer’s followers deliberately misread his meter in order to challenge his authority as a laureate. Rather than reproduce that meter, they reformed it, creating three distinct meters that vied for dominance in the first decades of the fifteenth century. In my analysis of 40,655 decasyllables written by poets other than Chaucer, I show that the fifteenth century was not the metrical wasteland so often depicted by editors and critics but an age of radical experimentation, nuance, and prosodic cunning. In Chapter One I present evidence against the two standard explanations for a fifteenth-century metrical collapse: cultural depression and linguistic instability. Chapter Two outlines an alternative framework to the statistical and linguistic methods that have come to dominate metrical studies. In their place I propose an interdisciplinary approach that combines the two techniques with cognitive science, using a reader-oriented, brain-based model of metrical competence to reframe irregular rhythms as problems that readers solve. Chapter Three applies this framework to Chaucer’s meter to show that the poets who inherited his long line exploited its soft structure in order to build competing meters; in that chapter I also argue that Chaucer did not write in iambic pentameter, as is generally assumed, but in a “footless” decasyllabic line modeled on the Italian endecasillibo. Chapter Four explores metrical reception; by probing scribal responses to Chaucer’s meter we can gain insight into how fifteenth-century readers heard it. Chapters Five through Seven investigate three specific acts of reception by poets: those of John Walton, Thomas Hoccleve, and John Lydgate. I conclude the dissertation by tracing the influence of Hoccleve and Lydgate on the later fifteenth-century poets George Ashby, Osbern Bokenham, and John Metham, and by identifying the eclipse of fifteenth-century meter with the Tudor poets Stephen Hawes and Alexander Barclay, who replaced a misreading of Chaucer’s meter with a misreading of Lydgate’s, inadvertently returning sixteenth-century poets to an alternating decasyllable reminiscent of Chaucer’s own meter. / text

Les fatistes du théâtre à sujet religieux souhaitent montrer aux spectateurs médiévaux le scénario biblique. Il s’agit de représenter la confrontation du Bien et du Mal dont l’enjeu demeure l’homme. Pour autant,si les Écritures offrent (fournissent, procurent ?) aux auteurs toute la matière iconique des personnages théâtraux de la sphère christique, le diable reste une entité aux contours flous, un profil théologique. La gageure des fatistes est donc de construire le diable, puis ses comparses, afin qu’ils puissent agir sur le hourd :l’amplification, la réécriture et la poétique de ces « théologiens-dramaturges » font naître le diable théâtral.D’œuvre en œuvre, hors de toute considération d’évolution de genre, le personnage diabolique grandit et prolifère jusqu’à apparaître sous de multiples visages individualisés : ceux de la « maisnie infernale ». Dotés d’une corporéité, d’une gestuelle et d’un langage nouveaux, les diables envahissent le hourd pour agir dans et sur le mystère de la Passion. La possibilité ainsi donnée aux diables d’être les serviteurs du message chrétien tout autant que de véritables actants dramatiques et paradramatiques concourt à leur individuation. Même partiellement factice, celle-ci se réalise pleinement dans le rire diabolique. En effet, que le rire provoqué par le mystère de la Passion soit critique ou qu’il serve d’exutoire, son origine est toujours diabolique.On peut alors concevoir que l’aspect divertissant des grandes Passions s’élabore au fil de l’essor diabolique qu’elles proposent. Surtout, on peut imaginer que les germes comiques, gestuels et dramatiques nés avec ces diables fleurissent, même après la fin de la représentation des mystères de la Passion, en d’autres œuvres et à d’autres époques. / The authors of the Passion plays on religious subject want to show the biblical scenario to the medieval audiences. It consists of representing the confrontation between Good and Evil whose main stake remains Man.If the Scriptures offer to their authors all the iconic material of the theatrical characters of the Christlike sphere,the Devil remains an entity with blurred outlines, a theological profile. What is at stake for the authors of thePassion Plays is to build the Devil and its stooges so that they can act on the stage: the magnification, therewriting and the poetics of those “theological playwrights” offer a birth to the theatrical Devil.From work to work, out of any consideration about the evolution of the genre, the diabolic charactergrows and multiplies to the point of appearing under numerous individualized faces: those of the « maisnieinfernale ». Endowed with a new body language, body movements, and language; the devils swept into thestage to act in and on the Passion Plays.The possibility which is offered to the devils of being the servants of the Christian Message as much as beinggenuine dramatic and paradramatic actors contribute to their individuation. This individuation, even partlyartificial, comes entirely true in the diabolic laughter. Whether it is a grating laugh or whether it acts as a kind ofrelease, the laugh provoked by the Passion Plays is always the result of the diabolic amusement.We can then consider that the amusing aspect of the great Passion Plays is worked out in the course ofthe diabolic development it offers. Above all, we can imagine that the dramatic, gestural and comical germswhich were born with those devils bloom even after the end of the representation of the Passion Plays in otherworks but in other periods too.

No description available.

Over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, canvas substituted panel or wall as the preferred support for painting in Venice, moving from the periphery to the core of artmaking. As it did so, canvas became key to the artistic processes and novel pictorial language developed by painters like Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese. Sixteenth-century critics associated canvas with painting in Venice, a connection that has persisted to become a veritable trope of Venetian art history. Despite this, we have hitherto lacked a convincing account of Venetian canvas supports and their impact. This dissertation, by examining the adoption, development, and significance of canvas in Venetian art over the period 1400 to 1600, attempts to provide one. Approaching canvas from multiple perspectives, this project offers a deeper understanding of what early modern canvas was at a material level, how it was made and supplied to painters, and its catalyzing role in early modern Venetian art. By tracing precisely how canvas operates within paintings, focusing on lodestar examples whilst drawing on extensive and intensive object-based research carried out on a large corpus, this thesis demonstrates how actively canvas participated in the elaboration of the pictorial poetics of mature Cinquecento art in Venice. It argues that we owe the existence of this distinctive artistic idiom in no small part to the twist of a yarn, the roughness of a thread, the thickness of a stitch. Canvas was critical to both the making and the meaning of these pictures. The wider aims of the project are twofold: on the one hand, to model a methodology that integrates approaches such as visual, textual, and sociocultural analysis with technical art history and conservation-informed comprehension of the materially altered nature of art objects; on the other, to contribute to an account of the history of an art form—the canvas picture—that still occupies a central role in the global art world today.

No description available.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the lives of men and women living in London and Bury St. Edmunds in the late fourteenth - early fifteenth centuries. Sources studied include the administrative and legal records of the City of London and of the Abbot and Convent of St. Edmund's abbey; legislation and court records of royal government and the wills and testaments of Londoners and Bury St. Edmunds' inhabitants. Considerable research on a wide range of topics on London, but far less work on Bury St. Edmunds, has already been undertaken; however, this thesis is the first systematic comparative study of these two towns. The introduction discusses the historiography and purpose of the thesis; the methodology used, and the shortcomings of using medieval wills and the probate process. Chapter One discusses the testamentary jurisdiction in both towns; who was involved in the will making process, and the role that clerics played as both executors and scribes and how the church courts operated. Chapter Two focuses on testators' preparations for the afterlife, their choices concerning burial location, funeral arrangements and the provisions made for prayers for their souls. Chapter Three examines in detail their pious and charitable bequests and investigates what ‘good works' testators chose to support apart from ‘forgotten tithes'. The family and household relationships, including servants and apprentices, are examined in Chapter Four, exploring the differences in bequests made depending on the testators' marital status, together with evidence for close friendships and social networks. Chapter Five discusses the ownership and types of books referred to in wills and the inter-relationship between the donors and the recipients. Testators' literacy and the provision for education are also investigated.

Il lavoro si propone di dare l’edizione critica e commentata di un breve canzoniere milanese anonimo (quarantanove componimenti). La tesi è strutturata in tre parti: nella prima si ricostruisce la tradizione del testo, tramandato interamente da un solo testimone manoscritto attualmente in collezione privata, e parzialmente dal ms. Basevi 2441 della Biblioteca del Conservatorio “Luigi Cherubini” di Firenze. In questa parte si propone inoltre una datazione del canzoniere (l’ultimo decennio del XV secolo), si attribuisce la scrittura al copista Giovanni Battista Lorenzi e l’unica miniatura presente all’artista noto come “Maestro B. F.”, coppia spesso attiva a Milano tra Quattrocento e Cinquecento nella realizzazione di manoscritti di lusso. La seconda parte si concentra sull’opera, di cui indaga la struttura, i temi, lo stile e la metrica. Il canzoniere viene inoltre contestualizzato nel panorama della lirica cortigiana settentrionale del secondo Quattrocento. La terza parte è costituita dall’edizione critica e commentata, preceduta da una nota linguistica. Ogni lirica è accompagnata da un cappello introduttivo e dal commento ai versi, in cui, attraverso il reperimento di modelli e luoghi paralleli, si mette in luce lo stretto rapporto dell’autore con i poeti cortigiani contemporanei. / The work aims to provide a critical and commented edition of a short anonymous Milanese collection of poems (fourty-nine compositions). The thesis is structured in three parts: the first retraces the tradition of the text, handed down entirely from a single manuscript currently in a private collection, and partially from Florence, Biblioteca del Conservatorio, ms. Basevi 2441. In this part it is also proposed that this work was composed in the last decade of the fifteenth century, the scribe was Giovanni Battista Lorenzi and an artist known as “Maestro B. F.” was the miniaturist. They were active in Milan between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and worked in pair in producting luxury manuscripts. The second section focuses on the “canzoniere” and investigates the structure, themes, style, and metric. I try to contextualize this collection in the northern courtly poetry of the second half of the fifteenth century. The third part offers the critical edition, preceded by a linguistic note. Each poem has an introduction and a commentary, that discussing models, sources and loci paralleli, shows the author's close relationship with contemporary courtly poets.

Dans les années centrales du XVe siècle, un notaire corse du nom de Giovanni della Grossa écrit le tout premier récit historique de l’île dans un contexte géopolitique particulier où s’affrontent les partisans seigneuriaux de la Corse aragonaise et ceux de la Commune de Gênes. À la fois témoin et acteur des événements qui déchirent la Corse du Quattrocento, Giovanni della Grossa participe à la guerre géno-aragonaise en livrant sa vision du conflit : une Corse chaotique. À travers son récit, il entend réordonner sur le plan idéologique les partis politiques insulaires, à savoir communal et seigneurial. Pour ce faire, il invente des origines politiques à la Corse qu’il transforme en modèle. Ce modèle est celui d’une monarchie comtale régie par un comte de Corse dont sont issus les ennemis de la Commune de Gênes : les Cinarchesi. Cette légende politique, de surcroît sans fondements historiques, motive plusieurs réécritures de l’œuvre du notaire au cours du Cinquecento. Deux versions nous sont alors parvenues : la « version courte », éditée en 1594 sous le titre d’Historia di Corsica, et la « version longue », imprimée pour la première fois en 1910. Les Histoires de Corse désignent ainsi ce corpus historiographique complexe qui comprend deux compilations historiques de plusieurs écrivains des XVe et XVIe siècles que les copistes, les compilateurs et les éditeurs scientifiques ont confondus. Cette thèse vise alors à retrouver, parmi les versions manuscrites et leur paratexte, le récit historique médiéval corse, plus précisément son discours politique qui s’est égaré entre la France, l’Italie et l’Espagne au cours des guerres des XVe et XVIe siècles. / In the middle of the Fifteenth century, a Corsican notary named Giovanni della Grossa wrote the earliest historical account of the island of Corsica, in the particular geopolitical context of the struggles between the feudal partisans of Aragonese Corsica and of the Commune of Genoa. At the same time witness and actor of the events that divide Corsica during the Quattrocento, Giovanni della Grossa participates in the Geno-Aragonese War and delivers his account of the conflict, describing a chaotic Corsica. Through his History, he intends to ideologically “reorder” the island’s political parties, distinguishing the communal party on one hand, and the seigneurial one on the other. In order to do this, he invents the political origins of Corsica and turns his invention into a model. This model consists in a monarchical county, under the rule of a count of Corsica chosen within the ranks of the Cinarchesi, enemies of the Commune of Genoa. This political legend, which is not founded on any historical basis, generates several rewritings of the work of the notary during the Cinquecento. Two versions survived: the “short version”, published in 1594 under the title of Historia di Corsica, and the “long version”, published for the first time in 1910. The Histories of Corsica thus designates this complex historiographical corpus, which includes two historical compilations of several writers of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth centuries that copyists, compilers and scientific publishers have often mixed up. This thesis aims to find, among the manuscript versions and their paratext, the medieval Corsican historical narrative, and thus tries to precisely seize a political discourse that was lost between France, Italy and Spain during the wars of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth centuries.

À la fin du Moyen Âge, la noblesse est en pleine restructuration en Castille. La chevalerie, qui lui était jusqu’alors intimement liée, commence à s’ouvrir à de nouveaux venus dans le cadre des guerres de reconquête tandis que les rois Trastamare s’entourent d’une nouvelle catégorie sociale, les letrados, qu’ils ennoblissent fréquemment afin d’asseoir durablement leur pouvoir. La vieille noblesse de lignage se retrouve alors dépossédée de ses prérogatives auprès de la couronne.Dans ce contexte régi par les lois alphonsines des Partidas et par les théories du droit du juriste italien Bartole, le XVe siècle castillan est le théâtre de nombreuses guerres civiles, qui voient s’affronter les partisans des souverains et de leurs favoris de noblesse récente, et les défenseurs de la vieille noblesse. Le conflit entre la noblesse « qui se mérite » et la noblesse « qui s’hérite » n’a pas lieu que sur les champs de bataille. À chaque recrudescence du conflit, de nombreux nobles prennent la plume afin de défendre leur position en proposant un discours théorique sur la noblesse. Le camp des partisans de la noblesse de mérite défend ainsi une représentation de la noblesse fondée sur le mérite propre et les services rendus au roi. De leur côté, les défenseurs de la noblesse de lignage proposent une vision de plus en plus exclusive de la noblesse au cours du siècle. Leur dernier représentant, Ferrán Mexía, met ainsi en place dans son Nobiliario Vero publié en 1492, une nouvelle théorie basée non plus sur le lignage mais sur le sang, à l’origine du verrouillage de la noblesse au XVIe siècle. / At the end of the fifteenth century, the Castilian nobility is getting reorganised. Until then, nobility was profoundly linked to chivalry, but at that time, chivalry is opening to newcomers with the Reconquista war. Furthermore, a new social category is surrounding the Trastamare kings: the letrados, who are frequently ennobled by the kings, willing to strengthen their power. The old nobility, coming from lineage, finds itself deprived from its prerogatives regarding the exertion of power.In this context, ruled by the Alphonsine laws of the Partidas and by the legal theories developed by the Italian jurist Bartolus de Saxoferrato, the Castilian fifteenth century is the theatre of numerous civil wars, in which the supporters of the sovereigns and of their favourites recently ennobled fight against the upholders of the old nobility.The conflict between a nobility of merit and an inherited nobility is not only military but also literary. Every time the conflict gets more intense, numerous noblemen get to write to defend their position, proposing a theoretical discourse on nobility. The side of the supporters of the nobility of merit defend a representation of nobility based on personal virtues and the service rendered to their king. On the other side, the defenders of the inherited nobility propose a vision increasingly exclusive of nobility as the century goes by. Their last representative, Ferrán Mexía, establishes in his Nobiliario Vero, published in 1492, a new theory of nobility not based on lineage anymore but on blood. This theory is behind the locking of the Spanish nobility in the sixteenth century.