Abstracts
p. 235-239
Texte intégral
1
Tribute to Jacques Le Goff
Jean-Claude
Schmitt
2Jacques Le Goff was not an «Other» for Poland and Poles. Since his first stay in Poland in 1958 and his marriage in Warsaw in 1962, he kept visiting the country and meeting numerous friends there. His collection of articles, Pour un autre Moyen Âge, reveals that the problem of alterity is the very centre of his work on the Middle Ages. Keeping that period at a critical distance and considering it as fundamentally different to our own allowed him to shed light on its cultural, linguistic, social or religious specificities from a long-term perspective. Thus, in his Saint Louis, Jacques Le Goff confessed his difficulty to fathom the personality of the holy king with whom he felt yet a strong empathy.
3
Sixty Years of Collaboration and Friendship of Polish and French Medievalists
Jean-Claude
Schmitt
4Thinking about alterity in history is intrically linked to considering of the treatment of «others» universitéforeigners, migrants, refugeesuniversitéin our own society while the Berlin Wall, pulled down in 1989, is somehow re-appearing in various forms across Europe. Since 1958, the cooperation of Polish and French medievalists, which long had got over all political obstacles, gave a radically other message of hope and humanity. It benefited from the uninterrupted commitment of different institutionsuniversitéin France, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, the University of Poitiers and the Centre de Civilisation polonaise of the Sorbonne, and in Poland, the Academy of Sciences of Warsawuniversitéand, above all, from the implication of strong scientific and human personalities: on the one hand, Jacques Le Goff and Fernand Braudel, among a lot of others, and on the other, Jerzy Kloczowski, Henryk Samsonowicz, Aleksander Gieyzstor, Witold Kula, Bronislaw Geremek and Karol Modzelewski mainly.
5
Meeting the Other in the High Middle Ages
Henryk
Samsonowicz
6Among the numerous peoples living outside the Roman Empire, one could distinguish between those who inhabited the Barbaricum, recognized as human although Barbarian, and the inhabitants of the ubi leones territories, who formed the domain of the Others. The latter, who were unknown, used to arouse fear. As geographical knowledge progressed, hybrid or semi-human creatures were located in areas which are more and more distant from the civilized world, following the example of the Amazones still located around 1000, according to some accounts, in the North-East of Poland. For Central and Eastern Europe in the High Middle Ages, the present article studies the notion of alterity. It analyzes the reasons which brought the peoples to enter in contact with close and distant neighbours and it challenges the concept of identity, especially through their collective memory and their historical myths.
7
Imagining the Other, Waiting for the End of Times: Islam and Latin Iberian Eschatology in the Eighth and Ninth Centuries
Mateusz
Wilk
8The present article aims to briefly discuss the evolution of the apocalyptic literature from the late Antiquity until the 9th century. Particlarly important is the question of the role of Islam in these sources. The adopted perspective allows to understand how traditional models of exegetical writing were modified in specific political or cultural contexts, such as the development of Asturian royal ideology or contacts with al-Andalus.
9
The Other is the Same One: What Means to be «Greek» in the Latin Documents from Italy (8th-11th Centuries)
Annick
Peters-Custot
10It is well known that the idea of a continuity between the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages, that Jacques Le Goff rightly sustained, may explain the competition developed between the Byzantine East and the Latin West on the question of the monopoly and of the definition of Romaness. The struggle for Rome’s inheritance, linked to the Empire, was reflected by the use of the word Grecus to distinguish what was characteristic of the Byzantine world in Latin sources produced in the 8th-11th centuries, during this crucial time for the relationships between the Western world, the papacy and the Eastern Empire. The Grecus-word use, linked to a polemical literature mainly developped at Rome, was helpful to deny to the Eastern Empire the qualification of Romanus, that was claimed by the basileus as a monopoly. Nevertheless, beside this polemic literature, many chronicles, hagiographies and notarial deeds written in Latin expose a more relaxed conception, in which the «Greek-being» is over all a linguistic and a liturgical feature, and a way to solve the difficulty to speak about an Imperial construction, when the Western historiography thinks, from the 6th century on, in terms of peoples: the word Grecus may allow to put the «Byzantines» into a genus. Even false, this ethnicization cannot prevent the fact that the «Greek»’s otherness was, for Latin people, light, superficial if not absent, and eventually much less important than the continuous conscience of unity and identity inside Christianity as a whole.
11
The City as an Experience Space of the Other: the Markers of the Otherness in Córdoba, from the Umayyads to the Almohads (8th-13th Centuries)
Christine Mazzoli-Guintard
12Although cities of Islam in the Middle Ages multiplied the opportunities to experience the same and the other, familiarity and otherness, only the faces of otherness were examined in a contribution which focuses on an exceptional urban setting of the history of al-Andalus, Córdoba, over a long period of time, from the 8th to the 13th century. The analyzed documentary corpus, i. e the work of the Arabic authors and archives of the ground, allowed to highlight the representations of othernessuniversitéthe lexicon used to express alterity, the way of considering otherness—, the practices of othernessuniversitétopographic, religious and linguisticuniversitéand the gradations of otherness, from acceptance to rejection. Two main points should be taken into consideration: turning differences into otherness which is sometimes illustrated by a few marks on the urban landscape, as a result of a complex process involving an invariantuniversitéa feminine otherness—, and of multiple gradations ranging from the recognition of closeness to the most radical otherness. Furthermore, the highlighting of profound differences within the same kind of otherness should require to pay the utmost attention to the lexical elements which always demand a sharp semantic analysis.
13
What is the Difference between a Pagan and a Christian? The “Other” in the Eyes of Carolingian and Ottonian Authors
Roman
Michałowski
14In his reflections the author draws on the following sources: Ermold the Black’s poem devoted to Louis the Pious, written in 826–828; Translation of St. Alexander, written in the 860s by two monks of Fulda, Rudolf and Meginhard; an anonymous Life of St. Adalbert written around 1000; and on another Life of St. Adalbert written a few years later by Bruno of Querfurt. Ermold the Black was of the opinion that pagans differed from Christians in that they lived in poverty. Obviously they would go to hell after death, but here on earth they lived with dignity though very modestly. Writing about the Saxon people before the conversion, Rudolf and Meginhard said almost only good things about them. The only thing they lacked to attain holiness was belief in the true God. Thus from the moral point of view there was no chasm between a pagan and a Christian. A different view was expressed by the authors of the oldest vitae of St. Adalbert. They thought that pagans not only worshipped idols but were also in moral decline. They accused them of greed, cruelty and savagery.
15
The Other as a Model. Saracens and Persians in the Official Correspondence of the
Basileis
with their Bulgarian Neighbours at the Beginning of the Tenth Century
Nicolas
Drocourt
16As it is well known, Byzantines frequently affirmed that they were the sole representatives of true civilization, compared to which the barbarians beyond the borders of the empire, who reveled in warfare, would always be inferior. As such, the barbarians could hardly been considered as models. Nevertheless, a quick glance at the official correspondence written in Constantinople in the beginning of the tenth century offers different perspectives. A few letters sent to the Bulgarian sovereign Symeon describe the Saracens as well as the Persians quite differently. In order to restrict the expansionism of the tsar at the expense of the Empire, two official Byzantine court writers, Theodore Daphnopates and Nicolas Mystikos, give various examples to Symeon where these neighbours appear as respectful of the Byzantine court and previous emperors. Though they were non-Christians partners, they acted in a better way than the recently converted Bulgarians to Christianity. Muslims and Persians are thus shown as political partners who the basileis could trust. Of course, such exempla are moralizing and based on past events when the Persians are evoked. Nonetheless, Symeon could understand it since he was educated in Constantinople for many years. Furthermore, to mention the Saracens as models is not without significance in the military context of the 920’s, when Bulgarians and Arabs tried to ally each other against the Byzantine Empire. It also demonstrates that in the official Byzantine chancery, Persians and Muslims were certainly considered as distinct neighbors of the Empire. Moreover, their particular case demonstrates that barbarians could be invoked as models when circumstances made such representation useful.
17
The Other’s Challenge: the Military Orders and the Defence of the Latin Christendom in the Middle Ages
Philippe
Josserand
18Today the military orders still remain associated to the frontier of the Latin Christendom, i. e. to the clear-cut line which supposedly separated it from the territories of the Infidels. They fought to protect and extend the frontier, but they also worked to settle it, to fortify it and to integrate it in new social and political structures. They accordingly developed a real relation to the Other that historians seldom if ever consider. The present study deals with this manifold conjunction. In the struggle against the Infidels which was the heart of their mission, the brethren joined together some of them, recruiting among Muslims mercenaries or professionals endowed with singular technical competences. In order to reinforce the colonization, they also employed non-Christians, even heathens, always subordinating the religious logic to the needs they maintained. Thus relations to the Other took shape-diplomatic links at first gradually turned into more quotidian, pragmatic relations, which led the brethren’s contemporaries to voice various criticisms against them. On both sides of the frontier, one learnt from each other and one sometimes regarded each other. Esteem was not unusual. Nevertheless, in spite of the exchanges and the borrowings, these relations are still considered from the point of view of confrontation for which Templars and their peers had been established.
19
A “Mahomet from the West”? The Valorization of the Prophet of Islam in Christian Europe (14th Centuries)
John
Tolan
20Victor Hugo sees Napoleon Bonaparte as a “Mahomet from the West”. He is not the only nineteenthcentury author to say so: in 1806, Goethe proclaims that Bonaparte is the “Mahomet der Welt”. Napoleon himself saw the prophet as a model of charisma, military prowess, and wisdom—a great leader, a great legislator, a great general: a model and an inspiration during his campaign in Egypt, a hero whom he staunchly defended when he wrote his memoirs in exile on the island of St. Helena. Napoleon’s adulation of the prophet (which we find also in Goethe and Hugo) is nothing exceptional in 18th and 19th-century Europe. Muhammad is often portrayed as a spiritual reformer, a model legislator and a “great man” by eighteenth-century authors such as Voltaire, Pastoret or Gibbon. The roots of this valorization of Islam’s prophet are found in doctrinal quarrels among Christians at the end of the Middle Ages and during the Reformation. In this article, we will first see how various authors and artists make Muhammad into a witness for the Immaculate Conception, a doctrine which provoked sharp debate within the Catholic Church. Then we will examine how various Unitarian authors, such as Miguel Servet, use the Qur’ān to refute the doctrine of the Trinity: for Servet, Muhammad is much closer to true Christianity than are the Trinitarian theologians, Catholic and Protestant. Then we will look at Henry Stubbe, 17th-century English republican and friend of Thomas Hobbes: he depicts Muhammad as a Hobbesian monarch who reforms Christianity and abolishes the power of the priestly class. Finally we will see how Morisco authors of the early seventeenth century recast sacred history in a series of apocryphal texts which valorize their liminal status between Christianity and Islam. One of these texts, the Gospel of Barnabas, makes Muhammad into the Messiah and limits Jesus to the role of prophet who announces the coming of Muhammad.
21
Europeans’ Opinions about Africans during the First Portuguese Expeditions (15th and Early 16th Centuries)
Michał Tymowski
22The author examines the opinions of Europeans about Africans that took shape during the period from the first contacts in the thirties of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th century. The latter time mark corresponds to the beginning—in the second and third decade of the 16th centuryuniversitéof the massive trade in slaves transported across the Atlantic to America. This phenomenon strongly influenced the change of European attitudes and opinions about Africans.
23The sources used by the author are made up of 15th century accounts from expeditions to the West African coast written by the knight Diogo Gomes and the merchants Alvise da Ca da Mosto, Eustache Delafosse and Antoniotto Usodimare; chronicles from early Portuguese voyages written by Gomes Eanes de Zurara and Rui de Pina; and descriptions from the early 16th century summing up the early Portuguese expeditions written by Valentim Fernandes, Duarte Pacheco Pereira and João de Barros. A number of iconographic sources and art works serve to complement those texts.
24Portuguese and other Europeans traveling to Africa found rather quickly that there was a great difference between the information about Africa drawn from ancient and medieval texts and the reality they had encountered. Their opinions about Africans thus took form above all on the basis of experiences of contacts with the local peoples. There was no room in them for preconceived notions and judgments. Entering into combat with Africans, and then initiating negotiations and trade contacts, they learned to characterize and judge peoples of different social and political organization, different economic activities, and different culture, beliefs and language. They identified languages that were particularly useful for establishing contacts. Moreover, they learned to make use of the Africans’social differentiationuniversitéfrom state rulers and dignitaries, chiefdom chiefs, merchants, all the way to people of the lowest social rungs.
25The enormous variety of peoples and cultures witnessed by the Portuguese raised for the latter questions having to do with the nature and the bounds of humanity and with the interpretation–in religious and practical terms–of this variety.
26The process by which the Portuguese got to know Africans and formed opinions about them was dynamic. As the latter were subject to change along with growing contact experience, the 15th century did not produce stereotypical notions and judgments. Only in the 16th century can we observe the first manifestations of stereotyping and preconceived ideas.
27
The Middle Ages Worldproof: Between Otherness and Familiarity
Patrick
Boucheron
28In his famous article «L’Occident médiéval et l’océan Indien: un horizon onirique», Jacques Le Goff asked a crucial question: did the rapid development of the discoveries between the thirteenth and the fifteenth century disenchant the medieval world confronting its old and written certainties with the observations of the real? Challenging this fruitful hypothesis is the aim of the present article. The paper would like to show that, far from making a breach in the dreamlike horizon of the medieval world, the travels of the fifteenth century moved the area of the believable maintaining open the field of the mirabilia. The medieval travellers moved between otherness and familiarity. They were listened to acknowledge that the real they observed could let expire that they had seen before. From here, the description, in a second part, of these remote archipelagos of familiarity which represent the space of the knowledge of the other. For it is to this generous form of imagination that the thought of Jacques Le Goff is calling us.

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