French

This essay explores the astronomical works of Pierre de Lille, a little-known French participant in the debates on calendar reform during the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–1517). It argues that astrological ideas coupled with eschatological beliefs motivated his astronomical propositions to reform the Julian calendar. De Lille conceived the calendar solar year as a unit of a great cosmic year spanning 7,153 years, the duration that he assigned to the now-obsolete theory of the motion of trepidation of the eighth sphere. Although his use of this astronomical model for astrological speculations about world chronology was not new, de Lille gave an original and bold reply to Pico della Mirandola’s devastating critique of astrology. The astronomical model and its astrological implications were eventually contested at the court and in academia in France, but the alliance of chronology, astrology, and apocalypticism was to play a major role during the second half of the sixteenth century in Lutheran thought.

Docteur en théologie, gardien du couvent des frères mineurs d’Angoulême
(1514-1529), abbé de Mélinais près d’Angers (1529-1542 ?), Jean Thenaud est bien connu des historiens, qui ont étudié ses relations avec la Cour, ses
voyages au Levant, ses travaux d’astrologue et sa spiritualité mystique
marquée par la Kabbale chrétienne. Or, comme
Rabelais cite par deux fois le franciscain, on a déduit de ces allusions non seulement que les deux hommes se connaissaient, mais encore que le cordelier avait inspiré le personnage de Jean des Entommeures. Ces déductions méritent d’être passées au crible.

Jacob Burckhardt famously placed the birth of autobiography during the Renaissance in the context of the discovery of the individual, and the awakening of the self. Few scholars today would fully embrace this master narrative. Medievalists posit the existence of a sense of individual selfhood much earlier, in the High Middle Ages, while many literary theorists of autobiography employ a narrow definition of autobiography focusing on personal development and reflexive subjectivity. Thus, literary theory effectively excludes from the history of autobiography most of what was written before the eighteenth century. Conversely, more recent cultural historians and historians of private life have sought to recover neglected forms of self-writing that do not fit modern definitions of the literary genre of autobiography: account books, semiliterate diaries, or astrological almanacs. They proposed neologisms such as life-writing, egodocuments, and selftestimonies to avoid the teleological implications of the Burckhardtian grand narrative, and to include texts that have been neglected by the traditional literary history of autobiography. The goal of this workshop is to bring together historians and literary scholars working on a wide range of late-medieval and early-modern self-writing forms that challenge the more common, postromantic ideas about autobiography, such as: family books, books of reason, almanacs, artisan autobiographies, but also prefaces and marginalia. Papers that can address the relation of these types of self-writing to the better-known genres of the vitae, commentarii, memoirs, confessions, essays, poetic autobiographies, etc. are especially welcome.