Poète picard du début du XIIIe siècle, le Reclus de Molliens est l’auteur à de deux textes à teneur morale, religieuse et savante, qui circulent sous les titres de Miserere et Carité. Même si ces deux textes édifiants connaissent une diffusion considérable au Moyen Âge et qu’ils rencontrent une réception plus que favorable auprès de plusieurs générations de lecteurs et d’auteurs anciens, ils ont largement été délaissés, voire négligés par la critique moderne, qui ne leur a accordé aucune monographie depuis la fin du XIXe siècle (Van Hamel, 1885). Si la présente thèse vise en partie à combler cette lacune par le moyen d’une mise à jour des données de base quant à la diffusion et au legs littéraire du Reclus de Molliens, elle propose avant tout une réflexion d’ordre poétique, qui engage de façon active le statut de canon littéraire de l’œuvre. À titre de textes à succès – qui font acte de modèle et d’étalon poétique aux yeux d’un vaste public –, Miserere et Carité paraissent tout désignés pour servir de guide et de point de repère poétique permettant de repenser la vitalité et les codes de la poésie édifiante, à l’aune des critères de jugement et des pratiques de lecture concrètes du public médiéval. La documentation historique liée au Reclus de Molliens révèle que le système de versification adopté dans Miserere et Carité, soit la strophe d’Hélinand (8aabaabbbabba), joue un rôle primordial dans la réception de l’œuvre. Comme il faudra le montrer, les textes en strophe d’Hélinand répondent à une série de règles cohérentes, spécifiques et différenciées (partie I), si bien qu’ils s’apparentent à un système poétique à part entière, doté de son propre « horizon d’attente » et de ses propres conventions de lecture (partie II). Ces règles non écrites, qui semblent directement infléchir la réception de Miserere et Carité, participent également du procès du sens en ajoutant un impact dramatique au propos édifiant (partie III). Dès lors que l’analyse de Miserere et Carité sera ainsi imbriquée à celle de ce corpus formel, il deviendra possible de dégager une poétique du texte édifiant en strophe d’Hélinand, qui sera guidée et balisée par le parfait exemple d’un poète à succès. / The Reclus de Molliens, an early 13th century French poet, is the author of two moralizing, religious and didactic texts known as Miserere and Carité. Despite its wide circulation, as well as its significant influence over subsequent generations of authors and readers, this work has been largely neglected by modern critics: the most recent monograph on Miserere and Carité was indeed published over one hundred thirty years ago (Van Hamel, 1885). The following dissertation aims at filling this gap in research by updating the basic data regarding the circulation and literary legacy of this medieval best-seller. Moreover, it provides a reflection surrounding the poetics of this work, which draws on its status as a part of a forgotten literary canon. The fact that Miserere and Carité were so widely read, and therefore constituted models and poetic benchmarks for a wide audience, makes them ideal case studies to rethink the vitality and the codes of moralizing poetry, based on the actual criteria and reading practices of the medieval audience. The historical documentation pertaining to the Reclus de Molliens reveals that the versification system adopted in Miserere and Carité, known as the Helinandian stanza (8aabaabbbabba), plays a vital role in the reception of his works. As will be demonstrated, works that are composed using this type of verse follow a consistent set of poetic rules (part 1). This means that they constitute a legitimate poetic system, with its own “horizon of expectations” and reading conventions (part 2). These implicit rules, which seem to have impacted the reception of Miserere and Carité, also contribute to the construction of meaning by adding a dramatic impact to their moralizing content (part 3). Once the analysis of Miserere and Carité is thus imbricated in the analysis its “formal family”, it will then be possible to define a poetics of the moralizing text written in Helinandian stanza, guided and framed by this successful poet.

This thesis is the first full-length study of the English clergyman and historian William Cave (1637-1713). As one of a number of Restoration divines invested in exploring the lives and writings of the early Christians, Cave has nonetheless won only meagre interest from early-modernists in the past decade. Among his contemporaries and well into the nineteenth century Cave’s vernacular biographies of the Apostles and Church Fathers were widely read, but it was with the two volumes of his Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Historia Literaria (1688 and 1698), his life’s work, that he made his most important and lasting contribution to scholarship. The first aim of the thesis is therefore to build on a recent quickening of research into the innovative early-modern genre of historia literaria by exploring how, why, and with what help, in the context of late seventeenth-century European intellectual culture, Cave decided to write a work of literary history. To do so it makes extensive use of the handwritten drafts, annotations, notebooks, and letters that he left behind, giving a comprehensive account of his reading and scholarly practices from his student-days in 1650s Cambridge and then as a young clergyman in the 1660s to his final, unsuccessful attempts to publish a revised edition of his book at the end of his life. Cave’s motives, it finds, were multiple, complex, and sometimes conflicting: they developed in response to the immediate practical concerns of the post-Restoration Church of England even as they reflected some of the deeper-lying tensions of late humanist scholarship. The second reason for writing a thesis about Cave is that it makes it possible to reconsider an influential historiographical narrative about the origins of the ‘modern’ disciplinary category of literature. Since the 1970s the consensus among scholars has been that the nineteenth-century definition of literature as imaginative fictions in verse and prose – in other words literature as it is now taught in schools and universities – more or less completely replaced the early-modern notion of literature, literae, as learned books of all kinds. This view is challenged in the final section of this thesis, which traces the influence of Cave’s work on some of the canonical authors of the English literary tradition, including Johnson and Coleridge. Coleridge’s example, in particular, helps us to see why Cave and scholars like him were excluded lastingly from genealogies of English studies in the twentieth century, despite having given the discipline many of its characteristic concerns and aversions.

It is universally acknowledged that international trade and cooperation have become key drivers of SMEs. Indeed, the success of SMEs in the sales sector depends upon their capacity to conquer the foreign market and compete with larger companies. Many SMEs today, in particular those in Central and West Africa, are very much aware of this reality. However, because of differences between domestic laws and their maladjustment, many African SMEs still struggle to enter the international market and compete with larger companies. It is therefore obvious that any SMEs that want to succeed in international commerce today will be called upon to confront different regulations, whether domestic, regional or international, which are often shaped according to the realities and expectations of a particular environment. The challenge today is to regulate and harmonise these different legal systems, in order to render the law identical in numerous jurisdictions. This process of unifying the law internationally, in particular the law of sale, started in 1920 and culminated in 1988, with the implementation of the CISG. This Convention, which has become the primary law for international sales contracts, endeavours to deal with this problem of differences in law between states on a global scale, by attempting to achieve a synthesis between different legislations, such as civil law, common law, socialist law, and the law regarding industrialised and Third World countries. Even though the CISG appears to be a compromise between different legal systems, the fact remains that it is not yet applicable in many countries, especially those in Central and West Africa, which are mostly still ruled by domestic and regional law, namely the OHADA. The purpose of this study is to attempt to analyse and compare the OHADA’s Uniform Act Relating to Commercial Law to the CISG, in order to identify similarities and differences between the two, and to determine, with regard to the operating mode and structure of SMEs in West and Central Africa, which one of the two legislations is more appropriate. / Private Law / LL. M.