La critique historique est ample et diverse. Quiconque aborde un témoignage, passé ou présent, écrit ou oral, le jauge, l'apprécie, l'utilise avec prudence et circonspection, se trouve peut-être dans la situation de Monsieur Jourdain face à la prose : il pratique, sans le savoir, la critique historique. Celle-ci, en dépit de son nom, n'est donc nullement un ensemble de principes austères et de techniques érudites réservés à quelques initiés dénommés " historiens ". Mais elle n'en constitue pas moins pour ces derniers le point de départ de leur démarche scientifique et universitaire. Elle les invite sans cesse à la réflexion et à l'action. Elle n'est pas collection de dogmes et de préceptes intangibles, mais elle possède au contraire une étonnante capacité de se remettre en question, à l'épreuve, en fonction des époques, des sujets, des types de sources abordés. Un goupe d'anciens étudiants du Professeur Jacques Paquet aux Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis, solidement formés par ce virtuose de la critique historique, atteste ici des multiples facettes de la démarche critique appliquée aux mots, aux choses et aux hommes. Entre les contributions originales rassemblées, aux objets si diversifiés, on décèlera un fil conducteur : la méthode.

Discusses the legal, social, and religious position of women in the Greco-Roman world, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Industrial Revolution, and modern era.

This study reveals how women’s visionary texts played a central role within medieval discourses of authorship, reading, and devotion. From the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, women across northern Europe began committing their visionary conversations with Christ to the written word. Translating Christ in this way required multiple transformations: divine speech into human language, aural event into textual artifact, visionary experience into linguistic record, and individual encounter into communal repetition. This ambitious study shows how women’s visionary texts form an underexamined literary tradition within medieval religious culture. Barbara Zimbalist demonstrates how, within this tradition, female visionaries developed new forms of authorship, reading, and devotion. Through these transformations, the female visionary authorized herself and her text, and performed a rhetorical imitatio Christi that offered models of interpretive practice and spoken devotion to her readers. This literary-historical tradition has not yet been fully recognized on its own terms. By exploring its development in hagiography, visionary texts, and devotional literature, Zimbalist shows how this literary mode came to be not only possible but widespread and influential. She argues that women’s visionary translation reconfigured traditional hierarchies and positions of spiritual power for female authors and readers in ways that reverberated throughout late-medieval literary and religious cultures. In translating their visionary conversations with Christ into vernacular text, medieval women turned themselves into authors and devotional guides, and formed their readers into textual communities shaped by gendered visionary experiences and spoken imitatio Christi. Comparing texts in Latin, Dutch, French, and English, Translating Christ in the Middle Ages explores how women’s visionary translation of Christ’s speech initiated larger transformations of gendered authorship and religious authority within medieval culture. The book will interest scholars in different linguistic and religious traditions in medieval studies, history, religious studies, and women’s and gender studies.

For a long time it was thought that there were no Middle Dutch sermons dating from the thirteenth century. It was only after J.P. Gumbert had redated the manuscript from The Hague containing the Limburg Sermons that its contents could be assigned to that century. Most of the Limburg Sermons appear to be translations of the Middle High German St. Georgen sermons. But sixteen of these texts are known only in Middle Dutch, and among these is to be found material drawn from the works of Hadewijch and Beatrijs van Nazareth. Thus the Limburg Sermons emerge to take their place in the famous tradition of Brabantine mysticism.

Exactly 450 years after the solemn closure of the Council of Trent on 4 December 1563, scholars from diverse regional, disciplinary and confessional backgrounds convened in Leuven to reflect upon the impact of this Council, not only in Europe but also beyond. Their conclusions are to be found in these three impressive volumes. Bridging different generations of scholarship, the authors reassess in a first volume Tridentine views on the Bible, theology and liturgy, as well as their reception by Protestants, deconstructing many myths surviving in scholarship and society alike. They also deal with the mechanisms 'Rome' developed to hold a grip on the Council's implementation. The second volume analyzes the changes in local ecclesiastical life, initiated by bishops, orders and congregations, and the political strife and confessionalisation accompanying this reform process. The third and final volume examines the afterlife of Trent in arts and music, as well as in the global impact of Trent through missions.