Cette étude exploite un texte peu connu de Philippe de Mézières : L’ordre de la Passion de Jésus-Christ. Produit en plusieurs étapes entre 1367 et 1396, c’est à cette dernière date que Philippe de Mézières, retiré au couvent des Célestins à Paris, remet de l’ordre dans son projet. La réflexion, menée à son terme, permet à son auteur de développer un espace ouvert propre au songe politique et de faire de la croisade, l’occasion de corriger, d’améliorer et de perfectionner une société chevaleresque abîmée et dégénérée et dont la purification des moeurs constituera la clef du salut de l’humanité chrétienne. Programme dont la précision témoigne d’un véritable dessein politique, L’ordre de la Passion Jesus-Christ permet de réfléchir à l’idée de réforme à l’aube du XVe siècle et de considérer la remobilisation d’un motif ancien au secours d’un présent chaotique sur fond de perspective sotériologique … une mise en pratique très concrète des idéaux de ce chevalier mystique de la fin du Moyen Âge.
Philippe de Mézières, Ordre de la Passion de Jésus-Christ, Costume du prince de l’Ordre de la Passion; Bodleian Library, Ms Ashmole 813, fol. 3r. Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.
Innovation and Medieval communities.The circulation of Ideas and practices in and out of the town (1200-1500).
This collective work edited by Élodie Lecuppre-Desjardin and Nils Bock, was published in January 2026 in the series Studies in European Urban History [SEUH 63] by Brepols.
Description
It has to be said that when it came to innovation medieval culture demonstrated its mastery of the art of the paradox. Medieval people were compelled to innovate, driven by the dissatisfaction that is part of their nature, leading to changes that could generate not only enthusiasm, but also mistrust and sometimes fear. In a world where innovation was ordinarily perceived in a negative light, societies developed discursive strategies to legitimize such developments, even going so far as to make the old out of the new. This book interrogates this gap between cultural assumptions and practical necessity. Drawing on numerous examples from the towns and cities of Western Europe between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries, it examines in context and in practice both sophisticated conceptions and unexamined habits of thought concerning innovation. These offered a range of possibilities for dealing with the new, often imposing novelty quietly, as the only means of maintaining the old state of affairs… at least in appearance.
PART 1. Mastering Innovation: Communities and Individuals
Municipal law in the monastery. On becoming and being citizens in the later Middle Ages -Anne Diekjobst (Kiel University CAU)
Burghers’ reactions to new town books in Southwestern Germany in the Late Middle Ages – Olivier Richard (Fribourg University)
Innovation and ways of relating to time in memory writings by German townspeople at the dawn of the Early Modern Period – Aude-Marie Certin (Haute Alsace University)
Innovation in the Great Municipal Charter of Paris (1416) – Boris Bove (Rouen-Normandie University)
PART 2. Technological innovation at the heart of the circulation of knowledge and political intentions
Innovations catalysed by the papal court and the reconfiguration of local communities in and around early 14th-century Avignon – Valérie Theis (ENS Ulm, Paris)
The dukes of Burgundy’s Trésor de l’Épargne and reactions to it within princely administration – Rudi Beaulant (Franche-Comté University)
Technological innovation, social identities and the Dynastic State. Gunpowder Artillery in the Burgundian Polity (late 14th– early 16th c.) – Michael Depreter (University of Oxford)
Innovation and migration: The Economic impact of immigrant craftspeople in Late Medieval England – Bart Lambert (Vrije University of Brussels)
Social incentives for innovation in Flemish artistic workshops: Social Network Analysis in late medieval art production – Joannes Van den Maagdenberg (UGent-ULB-Fondation Périer-d’Ieteren)
Plague Policies in the Fifteenth-Century Low Countries: Duplication, adaptation and Integration – Claire Weeda (Leiden University)
PART 3. Think different: pioneering ideas from artists and scholars
Ecclesiological Innovations in the days of the Reform Councils of the Fifteenth-Century – Bénédicte Sère (Paris Nanterre University)
Mediaeval sacred song: creative impulses and innovation in repertoire, musical notation and transmission – Kristin Hoefener (University Nova of Lisbon, Centro de Estudos de Sociologia e Estética Musical)
“A desire to see more clearly”: theological device and sociological innovation of scholars in thirteenth-fifteenth centuries – Antoine Destemberg (Artois University)
Van Eyck’s Fictive Frames and Reinventions of Memorialisation – Andrew Murray (The Open University)
More Information
Élodie Lecuppre-Desjardin & Nils Bock (eds.), Innovation and Medieval communities.The circulation of Ideas and practices in and out of the town (1200-1500, Turnhout: Brepols, 2026.
Guillaume de Machaut, Le remède de Fortune, Paris, BnF, ms. fr. 1586, fol. 30v.
Usages et circulation des imprimés à grande diffusion (XVe-XXe siècle)
Cet ouvrage collectif, dirigé par Constance Carta, Thalia Brero, Luana Bermúdez et Belinda Palacios est paru en avril 2025 auprès des Editions Droz, à Genève. Il est disponible en open access sur le site de l’éditeur.
L’invention et la diffusion spectaculaire de l’impression à travers l’Europe ne se fit pas seulement au bénéfice des textes classiques. Il y eut aussi, dès le début, une production importante d’ouvrages accessibles à tous, y compris aux personnes moins fortunées et peu instruites. Cette littérature, volontiers dite de colportage et souvent qualifiée d’éphémère, se distingue par l’incroyable diversité de ce qu’elle véhicule à travers un même format éditorial. Le florilège de cas étudiés dans les contributions de ce volume sous différents angles (historique, sociologique, littéraire ou encore matériel) permet de mieux appréhender le phénomène éditorial pluricentenaire des imprimés à grande diffusion, en réfléchissant principalement à la mise en récits d’événements et à la circulation des textes à travers le temps et les frontières.
During the preparatory phase of the Sinergia project, Marije Osnabrugge had the opportunity to edit, together with Gerrit Verhoeven and Brecht Deseure, a special issue of Early Modern Low Countries (7.2., published 21 December 2023) on the theme of the perception of time in the early modern Low Countries.
Besides editing the various contributions by scholars from a range of disciplines (incl. political history, cartography, cultural history, literary history, art history)) and with different original approaches to this topic, the editors of the special issue co-wrote the introduction. The volume also includes a collective publication by Élodie Lecuppre-Desjardin, Jan Blanc, Thalia Brero and Marije Osnabrugge.
Table of contents
Introduction, Gerrit Verhoeven, Brecht Deseure and Marije Osnabrugge
[top image: David Bailly, Vanitas Still Life, in the album amicorum of Cornelis de Montigny de Glarges, 16 July 1624, pen on paper, The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek.]
During the preparation phase of the research proposal that eventually led to the actualization of the ‘Capturing the Present’-project, Jan Blanc and Marije Osnabrugge published the edited volume Roma 1629: una microstoria dell’arte with the publisher Artemide, as part of the book series ‘Pensieri ad Arte’.
While the book focuses on artistic and cultural life in Rome in the year 1629 and thus falls outside the geographical scope of the FNS Sinergia project, its preparation, the introduction and intensive collaboration with a group of passionate contributors allowed the editors to explore methodological questions related to the perception of time, which is at the core of the current project. As such, the book part of the project’s extended prehistory.
DESCRIPTION OF THE VOLUME
This volume is a methodological experiment, which seeks to try to apply the considerable progress made in the field of microhistory to art history. Each of the eleven essays collected in this book deals with a cultural or artistic event that took place in Rome in 1629. Far from being an extraordinary year in the history of the papal city, 1629 in fact shows us ‘business as usual’ in the artistic life of the Urbe. The choice of a limited geographical and chronological framework, on the other hand, offers the opportunity to focus on the details of individual vicissitudes. Moreover, read together, the essays paint a multifaceted picture of the cultural life of modern Rome. They allow us to meet the main actors of Roman life in 1629 (from the Barberini and Cassiano dal Pozzo to Sandrart and Giulio Mancini), as well as to understand the dynamics of family networks, social (the Bentvueghels) and professional (the Academy of St. Luke) networks, and to open a research window on the practices of everyday life in the atelier (Antonio Bosio in front of his desk and Filippo Napoletano’s house-museum), in the building sites (Ciampelli in the Fabbrica di San Pietro and Valentin in the Barberini Palace) and in the street (Duquesnoy studying antiquities or the Florentines celebrating one of their new saints).
L’historiographie a longtemps considéré la rumeur comme le versant populaire de la propagande validée par l’autorité. Mais grâce à des études récentes, la rumeur a changé de camp et s’est vue reconnaître une plasticité propre à renforcer l’arsenal des outils de communication et d’influence tout autant manipulés par le pouvoir en place. Sur la base de cas anglais, français et bourguignons, cet article analyse non seulement les mécanismes de la rumeur (ses thèmes de prédilection, ses moyens de diffusion, les caractéristiques de sa crédibilité et de sa plausibilité), mais aussi son rapport au temps. En essayant de comprendre les raisons de son infinie répétition, la notion “d’histoire différentielle” permet de saisir les présents d’une époque et l’importance de la perception subjective comme moteur du caractère cyclique de la rumeur, sans cesse relancée dans le temps en fonction des attentes propres à chaque individu.
Historiography has long considered rumor as the popular side of propaganda validated by the authority. But thanks to recent studies, rumor has changed side and has been recognized for a plasticity suitable for strengthening the arsenal of tools manipulated just as much by the power in place. In this article, and on the basis of English, French and Burgundian cases from the end of the Middle Ages, I analyze not only the mechanisms of rumor (its favorite themes, its means of dissemination, its sources of credibility and plausibility), but also its relation to time. By trying to understand the reasons for its infinite repetition, I introduce the notion of “differential history” allowing us to grasp the presents of en era and the importance of subjective perception as a driving force behind the cyclical nature of rumor, constantly revived over time, according to the expectations specific to each individual.
Demonstration de l’assemblée publique des Estats tenuz en la ville et chasteau de Blois, soubs le perfide Henry de Vallois, Paris, Nicolas Le Roy et François Gence, [1589], gravure tirée de Pierre de L’Estoile, Les belles figures et drolleries de la Ligue, fol. 7r (détail), 1589-1594, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Avant d’étudier l’actualité impériale sous le règne de Charles Quint, Alexandre Goderniaux s’est intéressé, à travers des recherches dont ce livre est l’aboutissement, à la mise en texte du présent par un autre monarque : Henri III. Par l’étude et l’édition d’onze imprimés d’actualité, il démontre comment ce roi au règne si méconnu a cherché, en octobre 1588, à redevenir le maître des horloges.
PRESENTATION
Onze textes diffusés par les imprimeurs d’Henri III à la fin de l’année 1588 révèlent une autre histoire des États généraux de Blois. Ils ne résument plus l’assemblée aux assassinats des Guises (23 et 24 décembre 1588) et invitent à explorer ses deux premières séances (16 et 18 octobre 1588) dans toute leur densité. Maillons d’une vaste opération politique et communicationnelle, ces imprimés retracent d’amples prolégomènes grâce auxquels l’action gouvernementale d’Henri III peut être réévaluée. Le souverain y affirme la nature divine de son pouvoir et expose un projet de réforme destiné à fonder une ère nouvelle. Simultanément, il ambitionne d’assoupir les troubles civils par un modèle royal de la parole où sont imbriqués le bien-parler et le bien-gouverner. Ces textes constituent aussi une opération de communication savamment préparée par laquelle le souverain et ses imprimeurs diffusent une version idéale de l’assemblée : une scénarisation du succès royal y couronne Henri III dans un triomphe de papier. En outre, ils portent la trace vive d’un coup de majesté manqué, montrant comment Henri III tente, par la ruse, de neutraliser le discours ligueur, afin de redevenir le maître du jeu et du temps.
Demonstration de l’assemblée publique des Estats tenuz en la ville et chasteau de Blois, soubs le perfide Henry de Vallois, Paris, Nicolas Le Roy et François Gence, [1589], engraving taken from Pierre de L’Estoile, Les belles figures et drolleries de la Ligue, fol. 7r (détail), 1589-1594, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Before studying imperial news during the reign of Charles V, Alexandre Goderniaux focused on the textual representation of the present by another monarch: Henry III. Through research culminating in this book, and by analyzing and editing eleven news prints, he demonstrates how this little-known king sought, in October 1588, to reclaim control as the “master of the clocks.”
ABSTRACT
This volume examines eleven printed texts from 1588, offering a fresh perspective on the Estates General of Blois, moving beyond the infamous assassinations of the Guise brothers to explore the early sessions of the assembly and Henri III’s political strategy. It highlights how the king used these texts to assert his divine authority, promote reform, and shape an idealized narrative of his rule, while simultaneously working to counter the influence of the League.
This essay explores the pertinence of the present as a temporal category in the late medieval and early modern period. After a historiographical overview of scholarship on presentism and reflections on the complex notion of ‘present’, we present three case studies to explore how the experience of the present could be discerned and studied in literature, visual arts, and news media. The first case study focuses on the increasing emphasis on the present in the Gruuthuse manuscript and rederijker plays. Secondly, an examination of depictions of the breach of the Sint Anthonisdijk in 1651 shows different ways in which Dutch landscape painters engaged with the present. The final case study discusses how the spread of the northern invention of printed newsletters stimulated a wider interest in the present ‘elsewhere’ in apparent peripheric locations like Geneva. Drawing on these cases, we reflect on the relation between crises and presentism and suggest that the manner in which time, and the present in particular, was experienced in north-western Europe seems to be distinctly different from the relation to time of people in Renaissance Italy.
