“Splendid is the name of peace.” So begins the conciliar decree issued by five Aquitanian bishops meeting in synod at Poitiers sometime around, and quite probably in, the year 1000. The phrase had particular meaning and authority for tenth-century Aquitanian bishops, since it was borrowed from a letter by Hilary, the famed fourth-century bishop of Poitiers. The bishops went on to assert that they were meeting “for the restoration of peace and justice” in condemning, among other offenses, attacks on ecclesiastical (...) property. They cited as precedent both a council held five years earlier and one held at the abbey of Charroux. The bishops of the very same sees as those represented at Poitiers had indeed gathered in June of 989 at Charroux. They had claimed to have assembled so that “the criminal actions that, because of our long delay in calling a council, have been sprouting through evil habit in our dioceses will be rooted up and more constructive behavior implanted.” They had then threatened with anathema anyone who engaged in three very specific activities: taking ecclesiastical property by force; plundering agricultural resources from peasants; and attacking unarmed clerics. (shrink)

Previous work in the agri-food tradition has framed food auditing as a novelty characteristic of a shift to neoliberal governance in agri-food systems and has tackled the analysis of food “quality” in the same light. This article argues that agri-food scholars’ recent interest in the contested qualities of food needs to be situated alongside a much longer history of contested cultural attributions of trust in food relations. It builds on an earlier discussion suggesting that, although neoliberalism has undoubtedly opened up (...) new spaces for audit activity, older political and social dynamics operating around food audits were established long before the neoliberal historical moment. Breaking new ground (as far as is known) by looking further back than the early history of the organic social movement, it examines intersections of religious food auditing, migrant food culture, and commercial dynamics in food systems. Based on secondary sources, two contrasting case studies are presented to illustrate the flux and complexity for: New World Diaspora migrants to New York City of assuring food was kosher; and more recent Maghrebi migrants to southwest France of assuring food is halal. The article concludes by noting that the neoliberal moment stands not as the unique progenitor of a new style of food authority, but rather as the latest response to a wider rupture in the historically contingent arbitration of new forms of trust in food. (shrink)

Ayant collaboré aux premières années d'enseignement universitaire de la communication en France, aux côtés du fondateur Robert Escarpit, l'auteur témoigne tour à tour des engagements citoyens de ce brillant intellectuel, de ses choix conceptuels et de sa postérité, encore visible, tant en Aquitaine qu'au-delà des océans.Having worked in the early years of university teaching communication in France, alongside founder Robert Escarpit, the author demonstrates in turn commitments citizens of this brilliant intellectual, conceptual choices and his descendants still visible, as (...) Aquitaine and across oceans. (shrink)

Ancient Poetry in general makes the claim of divine inspiration, thus deriving authority from a supernatural source. Accordingly, it bases the validity of its message on a foundation beyond argument, which has consequences both for the relationship between poets and their poems, as well as between poems and their readers. In Christian Late Antiquity the divine foundation of poetry had to be renegotiated, and as a consequence authorities and arguments had to be given a new role in the Christian poetic (...) discourse. This paper will analyse the various possibilities and their consequences, also looking at the issue in terms of how far pagan poetry already foreshadowed such a development. The poets taken into consideration include Commodianus, Prudentius, the Carmen adversus Marcionitas, Prosper of Aquitaine, and Venantius Fortunatus. (shrink)

At the intersection of literature and history, three “antique romances” initiated a new genre in the mid-twelfth century by transposing into French the great stories of Greek and Latin epic: the fratricidal war of Oedipus's sons in the Roman de Thèbes, the founding of Rome in the Eneas, and the Roman de Troie's Trojan War based on Dares and Dictys. Rejecting Homer's version for these “eyewitness” accounts, Benoît de Sainte-Maure translated the full history of the Trojan War from its beginning (...) in the tale of Jason and the Argonauts to the annihilation of Troy and the victors’ unhappy homecomings. The myth of Trojan descent claimed by many European rulers, including the British and Normans, gives Benoît's translation more than entertainment value for his first public, the Plantagenêt court of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Indeed, while repeatedly assuring his readers that this great estoire, story and history, will provide pleasurable enjoyment, Benoît also signals a more serious intent by invoking Solomon and the seven liberal arts: we would be like beasts if not for learning from the past that allows us to distinguish between wisdom and folly. The author/narrator's school training is on full display as he highlights the importance of remembering and the dangers of forgetting. Obliged to share his knowledge, Benoît will put into romanz matter that is at once old and new, lost and refound, so that lay readers without access to his Latin sources can “remember” their past as he shapes it in romance. The success of his enterprise can be gauged by the number of extant manuscripts as well as the romance's subsequent influence on multiple versions of Trojan history, from the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César to Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. But can we pinpoint more specifically what and how Benoît's public might remember? (shrink)

The attribution of De vocatione omnium gentium to Prosper of Aquitaine, from the 17th century, has been the object of multiple debates, the results of whichare consolidated in the introduction to the critical edition of the tractate found in CSEL 97 (OAW 2009) in which the manuscript tradition was represented by a forked crest. The editors have considered the variae lectiones as errors, which differentiate two lines of transmission, not incorporated into the text of the edition. The variae lectiones, (...) however, according to the claims of Franco Gori, would be due, rather, to the intentional and intelligent interventions of a proofreader or an editor, perhaps by the author himself. (shrink)

Ce livre s’inscrit dans l’un des axes du programme de recherches interdisciplinaires Generatio, porté par la Maison des Sciences de l’homme d’Aquitaine, qui a exploré « La construction des jeunes générations en Europe, xixe-xxie siècle ». Le titre de cet ouvrage est fidèle à son contenu : il fait le point sur les nombreuses recherches menées depuis les années 1980 dans le domaine de la place – quantitative et qualitative – accordée au masculin et au féminin dans les ouvrages (...) de littérature de... (shrink)

This is the first edition to provide the complete text of both the fifth-century Calculus of Victorius of Aquitaine and Abbo of Fleury's Commentary on it. These two works shed light on the early history of mathematics, before the introduction of Arabic numerals. The wide range of Abbo's thought is reflected in the Commentary, covering the nature of wisdom, the philosophy of number, the relationship of unity and plurality, and the arithmetic of the Calculus - all of it set (...) in the broader context of his theology of Creation. This edition is crucial for our current reappraisal of Abbo of Fleury as a major figure of the tenth century, who had a profound impact on later medieval English thought. (shrink)

À partir du paradigme du cahier des charges imposés par l’ ars aux cmpp de Nouvelle-Aquitaine, l’article témoigne des menaces que font peser les politiques publiques de santé sur les institutions. Il s’agit d’une part de comprendre « l’idéo-logique » qui préside au démantèlement des institutions pour favoriser une conception postmoderne du soin où les institutions sont transformées en prestataires de services ; d’autre part, d’analyser ce glissement progressif de la désinstitutionalisation à la « désinstitution » qui menace les (...) fondements du soin psychique dans ses fonctions de reliance, de créativité, de transformation. Ainsi, l’article s’attache à cerner les effets de cette effraction qui infiltre les institutions, les équipes, jusque dans l’intimité de la rencontre thérapeutique. Cette néo-conception qui dénie ce qu’est la réalité psychique, la souffrance, invite à penser des questions pourtant légitimes de la diversité des pratiques, de la place des familles et de l’inclusion des sujets dans la société. (shrink)

In book eight of De trinitate Augustine of Hippo proposes two ways of coming to a vision of God, which have baffled me all my years of teaching Augustine.In the second of these he tells us to take “this good” and “that good” and to set aside “this” and “that” and promises that in doing so one will see God. Scholarlyliterature proved quite unhelpful in understanding what Augustine had in mind, especially since this procedure seems to presuppose that God, the (...) subsistent good, is present in particular good things and merely has to be unwrapped or unveiled in order for one to see the Good itself that is God. A clue to understanding what the bishop of Hippo had in mind can be found in his inversion of John’s claim in 1 John 4:8 to “Love is God.” Other Latin Fathers follow Augustine in this inversion, and Prosper of Aquitaine generalizes it for all the virtues or excellences. If one bears in mind the Plotinian doctrine of the integral omnipresence of suchvirtues or excellences, each of which is God, the sort of abstraction of the Good itself from individual good things, as Augustine proposed, becomes intelligible,and Henry of Ghent illustrates this sort of abstraction in his metaphysical argument for the existence of God. (shrink)

The Author replies to a review recently published by Franco Gori in the journal Augustinianum. The point of disagreement advanced by the Author is the basic hypothesis which she finds in Gori’s essay, according to which textual variants in De vocatione omnium gentium go back to the author himself, i.e., to Prosper of Aquitaine.

Among the high aristocrats of the Carolingian and post-Carolingian world, the naming of children was a serious business—so serious as to be almost immune to fashion and to personal taste. Before the twelfth-century demographic upswing, the number of children in each family who survived childhood and could be counted on to continue the tradition of their parents was small. Many illustrious lines, like that of Gerald of Aurillac or of William the Pious, duke of Aquitaine, died out rapidly; other (...) families, like those of the dukes of Normandy or the counts of Flanders, survived by the skin of their teeth. Therefore, in christening their first legitimate male offspring, early-medieval aristocrats would choose a name designed to underline family continuity, usually the name of the child's paternal grandfather. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Epistemology: intentional being Ontology I: individuals and concepts Ontology II: accidents Auriol's historical significance.