Dire et peindre le Moyen Age

This book brings together articles published by Laurence Harf-Lancner for about thirty years in French and foreign journals and collectives, of varied distribution and access. In these investigations into the ways in which men of the Middle Ages were able to tell each other and to paint themselves in literature, the imagination is the first privileged observatory: the stories of demons and wonders inform the dreams and fears of readers medieval. The rewriting game is a second key: clerics translate Latin into French, verse into prose, reinterpreting the values and ideology of their sources. Literature also has its place in the historical understanding of the Middle Ages, helping to decode the reality of the social game, shaping historiography. Finally, the images and the words of the manuscripts translate, in their echoes as in their oppositions, the same reality in two different languages.