La Renaissance dans les provinces septentrionales
Troisième journée d’études “Les réformes religieuses dans les anciens Pays-Bas (XVIe-XVIIe siècles)”
Arras, Université d’Artois, Maison de la Recherche
10 novembre 2017

Des lectures religieuses de laïcs à Amiens avant la Réforme.

Margriet HOOGVLIET, Postdoctoral Researcher, Université de Groningue

Lors des commémorations de 500 ans de Réforme, on lit régulièrement que Luther et Calvin auraient donné la Bible traduite en langue vernaculaire et des textes catéchétiques aux laïcs, qui en auraient été dépourvus pendant tout le Moyen Âge : « Ceux et celles dans les bancs d’église n’étaient plus obligés de se fier aux dires des curés et des évêques au lieu de la parole de Dieu » (The Guardian, le 19 mars 2017). Dans cette intervention je voudrais examiner de plus près les lectures religieuses de laïcs à Amiens (et accidentellement à Tournai et à Douai) pendant le passage du XVe au XVIe siècle (c. 1450-1530), afin de montrer que toutes les couches de la société urbaine avaient accès à la culture écrite et que la majorité de la population avait vraisemblablement une connaissance solide de la religion, parfois assez avancée. Dans certains textes catéchétiques en Français/Picard les laïcs étaient encouragés à partager leurs connaissances bibliques et religieuses avec leurs proches. En outre, certains évêques menaient une politique active de « réforme » de la vie religieuse des laïcs, comme, par exemple, Jean Avantage (1437-1456) à Amiens. Par conséquent, l’idée courante de la Réformes luthérienne et calviniste comme une réaction contre une Église dysfonctionnelle est à mettre à question pour ce qui est des régions Picardie-Flandre et on pourrait avancer l’hypothèse que la participation active des laïcs à la vie religieuse était plutôt un terreau fertile.

Heresy and Bible Translation in the Middle Ages and at the Dawn of the Renaissance

Première journée d’études, 27 octobre 2017
Centre d’études supérieures de civilisation médiévale, CNRS, Université de Poitiers, France

Sabrina Corbellini: New Communities of Interpretation. Bible Translations, Readers and Users in Late Medieval Europe

 Main aim of this introductory lecture is to reflect on the central issues of vernacular Bible translations, orthodoxy, heresy and dissent drawing from the experience gained within the framework of the research project Holy Writ and Lay Readers, New Communities of Investigation and Cities of Readers. The projects are focussed on the connection between vernacular Bible translations (and religious texts in general) and religious transformations with a specific focus on the “human factor”. It is essential to approach these topics from a point of view that challenges traditional research paradigms and crosses or at least questions the boundaries of orthodoxy and heterodoxy and approaches vernacular Bible translations not just as a wish to create an “alternative” to “traditional” religion but a manifestation of social, cultural and religious transformations.

Sabrina Corbellini, Chair History of Reading in Premodern Europe, Department of Medieval History, University of Groningen, the Netherlands

International conference “Über Religion entscheiden. Religiöse Alternativen und Optionen im spätmittelalterlichen und frühneuzeitlichen Christentum”, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster, Germany
19-21 October 2017

Reconstructing an Urban Reading Public: A Spatial Approach to Religious Reading in Late Medieval Italy

Recent research has shown that the fifteenth century is characterized by high levels of involvement and commitment in religious activities of urban laity and the growing diversification of “possibilities” to integrate religious activities into daily and worldly life. It was, citing the seminal contribution by John van Engen, a period of “multiple options”, discussions, choices and even conflicting attitudes. Although a throughout analysis of the fifteenth century transformations and their significance for the early modern “religious plurality” is still a desideratum, this presentation aims at discussing three central issues in the study of fifteenth century religious life: a. the possibility for lay believers to access, read, comment and discuss religious texts, mostly in the vernacular (although the access to Latin texts should not underestimated); b. their strategies to find and select their reading materials and “navigate” through the abundance of available texts, in order to create their own religious persona; and c. the creation of “sacred networks”, including lay and religious alike, that facilitated the transmission and the availability of texts and contributed to the dissemination of specific reading habits and techniques.

In order to scrutinize and better grasp the interconnectedness and the intersection of these three pivotal issues for the understanding of late medieval and early modern religious transformation, the late medieval religious text panorama will be analyzed through a spatial approach, i.e. focusing on the reconstruction of “spaces for reading” in the late medieval urban cityscape. Which were the channels of dissemination of religious knowledge? Where could the late medieval reading public find religious texts? Which were the conditions for accessing religious texts? And most importantly who were the agents in this process of dissemination of religious texts and in the creations of lieux de savoir religieux in late medieval Italian cityscape? And how were these readers trained to engage in process of selection, discussion and interpretation? Fundamental in this approach to late medieval religious readership is the application of the concept of lieu de savoir (places of knowledge), “lieux de savoir”, places of knowledge, created by the French historian Christian Jacob. In Jacob’s definition a “ ‘lieu de savoir’ is a space of construction, materialisation, inscription and social transmission. It is strongly linked to a dynamic and genetic approach to knowledge situated in a spatial and social framework. Moving from one space to another, knowledge is built, transformed, divided and merged, it changes its status and value, it lives or dies, it moves through time and space and through human societies”.

In order to reconstruct the late medieval Italian reading public and their interaction with religious texts, in particular in the vernacular, I will describe and examine three groups of sources that convey essential information about “spaces of religious knowledge”:

1. Manuscript miscellanies, which will be studied as “snapshots” of late medieval religious textual culture, registering the presence, circulation and transformation of religious knowledge and outcomes of processes of selection and adaptation in a period of textual dynamics and interpretational plurality. They are moreover material evidence of late medieval “geographies of reading” and bear witness of the active search for texts and books, contributing to an essential step in research on late medieval readership: moving away from a research focused on individual book owners and heading towards the awareness of the formation of “communities of readers” literally gathering around books and reading, and actively getting involved in an exchange of objects and of textual knowledge.

2. Archival sources, such as testaments and probate inventories, reporting evidence of book ownership, the creation of “links and flows” of transmission of religious textual knowledge and the formation of a “shared reading cultures” across the traditional boundaries between lay and religious individuals and groups;

3. Catalogues and inventories of late medieval libraries, testifying of the seminal relevance and ethical dimension of creating spaces and places dedicated to books and reading, real nodes in the religious knowledge transmission networks and at the very heart of the construction of religious textual dynamics.

Web Programm Tagung Über Religion entscheiden

“La Bible et la réforme/Réforme”

Sektion 4: 73 Konfessionsdynamiken in den romanischen Literaturen der Frühen Neuzeit/ Dynamiques confessionnelles dans les littératures romanes de la première modernité

DYNAMIK – BEGEGNUNG – MIGRATION, 35^th Romanistentag, Universität Zürich, Switzerland (08-12 October 2017)

English summary:
Shared religious reading practices and confessionally undefined French Bible translations in the early sixteenth century

After 1520 the theologians of the Sorbonne sharply condemned new French translations of the Bible and they were highly suspicious of religious books in French. In line with their ideas, several town councils decided to confiscate religious books in French. On the other side of the confessional divide, the followers of l’Évangélisme and later the Protestants were actively promoting active reading practices of the French Bible translation an indispensable element of lay religiosity. Modern research has often taken the confessional polarization at face value and has generally accepted a simple binary division with regard to religious reading practices by lay people, with specific and clearly distinguishable Roman Catholic and Protestant reading cultures. In my paper I will challenge this idea by discussing textual, codicological, and archival evidence showing that several French Bibles, bible-based texts and other religious texts were read by both Roman Catholic and Protestant lay people. The theologians of the Sorbonne did not target all religious texts in the vernacular, and, surprisingly, some of them were printed and sold in Paris without any hindrance. In spite of the polarizing disputes, lay people from Roman Catholic and Protestants backgrounds shared in many aspects a very similar religious reading culture. Moreover, and confirming Thierry Wanegffelen’s book Ni Rome, ni Genève (1997) many lay people were highly interested in the religious debates of their times and they did not always made a clear confessional choice.

Programme du colloque Dynamiques confessionnelles 170911