Academic literature on the topic 'Kings of Navarre'

La gran expansión territorial protagonizada por Alfonso I de Aragón y Pamplona atrajo a muchos nobles, que trataron de beneficiarse mediante la obtención de botín o la concesión de tenencias para ellos o sus familiares. Entregar en tenencia un territorio permitía a los reyes afrontar los problemas endémicos que suponía poblar un término, lo que se veía agravado por la escasa demografía y el gran coste económico de la defensa. Por ello, los reyes de Aragón y Pamplona acudieron a la entrega de territorios a nobles para que éstos se encargaran de poblarlos y defenderlos; es lo que se conoce como «tenencias», una institución que suponía una serie de derechos y obligaciones para quien las recibía, reservándose la propiedad del territorio el rey, y que permitía la extensión de la influencia de una determinada familia o linaje. Casi desde la aparición del reino de Aragón los barones pamploneses constituyeron un foco de gran influencia cerca de los reyes y trataron de expandirla mediante matrimonios y la obtención de determinadas tenencias. Esta investigación tiene como objetivo estudiar el fenómeno a través del caso concreto de la familia navarra Lehet y su relación con los dos primeros señores de Soria, Íñigo López y Fortún López.Abstract The great territorial expansion carried out by Alfonso I of Aragon and Pamplona attracted many nobles, who tried to benefit from it by obtaining booty or land grants for them or their relatives. Offering land tenure was a way for kings to deal with the endemic problems derived from the need to populate a given territory, which was in turn aggravated by weak demographic numbers and a high cost of defence. Hence, the kings of Aragon and Pamplona used the concession of land grants to nobles so that they would guarantee establishing a settlement and defending it: this is what is known as tenure (tenencias), an institution that stipulates a series of rights and obligations for those who received them, while the king maintained the property of the domain and allowed for the increased influence of a certain family or lineage. Virtually since the origin of the kingdom of Aragon, the barons of Pamplona formed a circle of great influence around the kings and tried to extend it through marriages and increasing certain land holdings. This phenomenon will be examined through the specific case studies of the Lehet family of Navarre and their relationship with the first two lords of Soria, Íñigo López and Fortún López.

This paper aims at exploring the dramatic utopias staged by Shakespeare in order to reassess the playwright’s ambivalent use of geography and to better understand the function of his imaginary landscapes. I therefore briefly comment upon eight overlapping categories of Shakespearian utopias before studying one of them, i.e. Navarre’s academic utopia, in more detail. Indeed, in Love’s Labour’s Lost, the King significantly banishes all feminine presence from his “little academe”, which is all the more ironical as the real King of Navarre was considered as a womanizer by Shakespeare’s contemporaries. I will then argue that in fact, the playwright uses King Ferdinand’s utopia in order to rehabilitate women and promote a form of Babelian universe instead of the closed, protecting space of his library.

A sentimental domestic scene, François I and Marguerite of Navarre, was painted in 1804 by the Salon painter Fleury Richard (fig. 1). As he explained, it illustrates an anecdote from the legend of François I. The king's sister, Marguerite de Navarre, is shown discovering on the windowpane a graffito about the inconstancy of women. François — the great royal womanizer — has just scratched it there and looks very pleased with himself.This painting signals not only the early nineteenth century's fascination with the Renaissance king, but reveals its attitudes about the Renaissance itself. For example, the setting and the costumes betray a confusion about the periodization of Gothic and Renaissance: the room in which the scene takes place is of Gothic revival design, while another room - in neo-classical style - opens beyond; the king's costume is historically correct, but Marguerite could be Maid Marian.

The development process of a law in Navarre brings to light some particularly interesting features, one of which has still not been studied by the historians of our country: Parliament’s power to prevent a law approved by the King from ever coming into force. This was done by not including this approved petition in the documents required so that the Viceroy could sign the General Patent, by which the laws, once published in ‘las cabezas de Merindad’ (districts) of the Kingdom, would become effective.

Celluy qui dit ta grace, eloquence & scavoirNe estre plus grands que humains, de pres ne t'a peu veoirEt à qui ton parler ne sent divinitéDe termes et propos n'entend la gravità.De l'Empire du Monde est ta presence digne,Et ta voix ne dit chose humaine, mais divine.Combien doncques diray l'Ame pleine de grace,Si outre les Mortelz tu as parolle et Face?Clement Marot, EpigrammePoem Bestowing upon François IER the essence of divinity was not a flattering aberration but an example of imagery that became emblematic of his long reign. As Anne-Marie Lecoq has shown in her incisive analyses of many laudatory illuminated treatises and poems and extravagant royal entries with theatrical enactments, the king was glorified by an allegorical symbolism often intricately interwoven with Christian typology as deemed appropriate, indeed necessary, for “un roi très chrétien” who was the brave, virtuous, pious elect of God.

Donne's Pseudo-Martyr is his first major published work and the longest that he ever wrote. As he argues in it about the relationship of the state and religion to each other, he establishes Henry IV of Navarre, king of France, as one of his models of a competent and tolerant king. Henry's credentials for the title are his moderation, his steadfastness and fearlessness amid religious conflicts between Catholics and Protestants in his own country, and in the face of the power of the papacy. In the pages of Pseudo-Martyr, Donne calls upon the English Catholics to swear allegiance to James I as a political leader, in the same manner in which French Catholics and Protestants swore allegiance to Henry.

In the spring of 1314, the three daughters-in-law of King Philip the Fair of France were seized as adulteresses, and two young knights, their alleged lovers, were brutally put to death at Pontoise, their property confiscated.1 The knights in question were brothers, Philippe and Gautier d’Aulnay, whose actions brought singular dishonor to their line and to their father Gautier, a faithful vassal and supporter of Count Charles of Valois, Philip the Fair’s brother and close confidant.2 Two of the king’s disgraced daughters-in-law were sent to the Norman fortress of Château-Gaillard. The oldest, Marguerite of ducal Burgundy (ca. 1289‐1315), the daughter of the late Duke Robert of Burgundy (1248‐1306) and of Saint Louis’s daughter Agnes of France († 1327), was married to Louis (1289‐1316, r. 1314‐1316), king of Navarre and heir to the throne of France. Taken with her was Blanche of Artois and comital Burgundy (1296/1297‐1325/1326), wife of the king’s third son Charles of La Marche (1294‐1328, r. 1322‐1328), and daughter of the late Count Othon of Burgundy († 1303) and of Mahaut († 1329), countess of Artois and Burgundy. Jeanne (1287/1288‐1330), Blanche’s elder sister and wife of Philip of Poitiers (1290/1291‐1322, r. 1316‐1322), enjoyed prestige and standing the other two lacked because of the great landed inheritance, the county of Burgundy, which she had brought to her marriage. Perhaps because of this, perhaps because her guilt seemed less clear than that of the others, she was treated differently and imprisoned near Paris, at Dourdan. After Philip the Fair died on 29 November 1314, Jeanne was released, around Christmastime, declared innocent after proceedings in the Parlement of Paris. News of the shocking and unprecedented scandal spread throughout the realm of France and beyond its borders. Marguerite and Blanche were generally considered guilty, even though there was wonderment at how the affair could have taken place.3

This paper presents the biography of Santiago Luzuriaga y Odria (1828-1904), a teacher from Navarre (Spain), who enjoyed a long professional career and was the father of the Spanish pedagogue Lorenzo Luzuriaga. Santiago Luzuriaga was the author of singular works, which he called nobelas-komedias, written after the Spanish Government agreed to start paying teachers’ salaries beginning in 1901. The Archivo General de Palacio (General Archive of the Royal Palace of Madrid) and the Real Biblioteca (Spanish Royal Library) preserve some of these nobelas-komedias, which feature the peculiarity of being written with a phonetic spelling. The author argued for the necessary transformation of writing for the purpose of achieving a greater economy of language. Finally, the paper includes a copy of El ermano del alkalde dedicated to King Alfonso XIII of Spain, which is currently in the Real Biblioteca.

Cette thèse de dimension internationale, n'a pas seulement l'objectif de restituer une histoire de la famille Foix-Béarn-Navarre à partir de leurs archives. Il s'agit plutôt de mettre en évidence les liens complexes entre la famille royale de Navarre et ses archives notamment entre le XVe siècle et le XVIIe siècle, en envisageant le statut et le rôle des archives constituées dans la construction de l'histoire, l'identité et la mémoire de cette maison entre la fin du Moyen Âge et le début de la période moderne.Pour la réalisation de cette thèse, nous avons étudié, entre autre, deux volumineux inventaires réalises au XVIe siècle qui nous ont permis de connaitre l'évolution de l'histoire des archives conservés à l'époque dans le trésor du château de Pau. Concrètement ces deux inventaires marquent une époque importante d'auto-affirmation du pouvoir de la famille royale de Navarre, car le premier des ces inventaires fut d'un grand intérêt pour cette famille dans le processus de création d'un État moderne en Béarn, sous le règne d'Henri II de Navarre, et le deuxième (réalise vers 1580-1582) fut le dernier inventaire de la souveraineté, car à partir de l'arrivé d'Henri III de Navarre au trône de France, les archives du trésor de ce château se fossilisèrent.Nous avons souligner au début de cette résumé la dimension internationale du sujet de cette thèse puisqu'une partie des archives de cette maison royale, conservée actuellement dans les ADPA est en étroite relation avec documents gardés à l'heure actuelle dans l'Archivo General de Navarre, situé à Pampelune. Ce sujet a été aussi peu étudiée que l'histoire, l'identité et la mémoire de la famille royale de Navarre sous les règnes de Catherine de Foix (1483-1517) et Henri II (1517-1555).L'organisation des archives fait partie de la construction politique des rois de Navarre, d'une identité politique dans laquelle le Béarn (avec la Navarre) exerce depuis la fin du XVe siècle un rôle prépondérant en tant que territoire indépendant au marge de France. C'est la politique menée par ces rois, qui explique le processus de centralisation dans le chartrier de Pau d'archives procédant de leurs divers domaines (même si la plupart d'entre eux sont des territoires dépendants de la Couronne de France).Enfin, nous voulons citer l'étude réalisé de l'évolution des techniques ou systèmes d'archivage de la documentation du trésor de chartes de Pau dans la longue durée : En ce qui concerne tout d’abord l'évolution des modèles de conservation, classement et description archivistique entre la fin du Moyen Âge et l'époque moderne, se met en place une organisation des archives de plus en plus claire et efficace. L'inventaire de la première moitié du XVIe siècle est divisée par les divers domaines familiales mais nous montre une pauvre organisation pauvre qui ne suit aucun ordre thématique et méthodique dans la façon dont les documents avaient été répertoriés. En revanche, le registre élaboré au début de la décennie 1580 suit une organisation plus méthodique, comme le prouve la division de chaque titre par chapitres thématiques, et la subdivision de chaque chapitre en liasses numérotés. En plus, à la différence des nombreux systèmes de cotation documentaire utilisés par les archivistes dans la première moitié du XVIe siècle, ceux qui ont élaboré l'inventaire du début de la décennie 1580 ont opté pour l’uniformisation d’un système de cotation numérique en chiffres romains.En ce qui concerne l'évolution des modèles de conservation, de classement et de description archivistique, cette étude nous explique aussi les systèmes successifs de cotation de la documentation du trésor de chartes de Pau en fonction des contextes dans lesquels ils ont été réalisés à l’époque moderne et plus particulièrement au XIXe siècle, à l'époque de la naissance de la dénommée comme l'archivistique moderne
This international-wide thesis(theory), has not only the objective to restore a history(story) of the family Foix-Béarn-Navarre from their archives. It is rather a question of highlighting the complex links between the royal family of Navarre and its archives in particular between XVth century and the XVIIth century, by envisaging the status and the role of archives established(constituted) in the construction of the history(story), the identity and the memory of this house between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modern period.For the realization of this thesis(theory), we studied, among others, two voluminous inventories realize in the XVIth century who allowed us to know the evolution of the history(story) of archives kept(preserved) in the time(period) in the treasure of the castle of Pau. Concretely these two inventories mark an important time(period) of auto-assertion of the power of the royal family of Navarre, because the first one of these inventories was of a big interest for this family in the process of creation of a modern State with Béarn, under Henri II de Navarre's reign, and the second (realize by 1580-1582) was the last inventory of the sovereignty, because from the arrived of Henri III de Navarre in the throne of France, the archives of the treasure of this castle fossilized.We have to underline at the beginning of this summary the international dimension(size) of the subject of this thesis(theory) because a part(party) of the archives of this royal house, kept(preserved) at present in the ADPA is in narrow relation with documents kept(guarded) at the moment in Archivo General of Navarre, situated in Pamplona. This subject was little studied as well as the history(story), the identity and the memory of the royal family of Navarre under the reigns of Catherine de Foix ( 1483-1517 ) and Henri II ( 1517-1555 ).The organization of archives is a part of the political construction of kings of Navarre, of a political identity in which Béarn (with Navarre) exercises since the end of the XVth century a leading role as independent territory in margin of France. It is the politics led by these kings, that explains the process of centralization in the chartrier of Pau of archives proceeding of their diverse domains (even if most of them are territories dependent on the Crown of France).Finally, we want to quote the study realized by the evolution of techniques or archive systems of the documentation of the treasure of charters of Pau in the long lasting: as regards first of all the evolution of the models of preservation, classification(ranking) and the archival description between the end of the Middle Ages and the modern time(period), is set up an organization of the more and more clear and effective archives. The inventory of the first half of the XVIth century is divided by the diverse domains station wagons but shows us a poor poor organization which follows no thematic and methodical order in the way documents had been listed. On the other hand, the register developed at the beginning of decade 1580 follows a more methodical organization, as proves him(it) the division of every title by thematic chapters, and subdivision of every chapter in bundles numbered. Besides, unlike the numerous systems of documentary quotation used by the archivists in the first half of the XVIth century, those who developed the inventory of the beginning of decade 1580 opted for the standardization of a system of digital quotation in Roman numerals.As regards the evolution of the models of preservation, classification(ranking) and archival description, this study also explains us the successive systems of quotation of the documentation of the treasure of charters of Pau according to the contexts in which they were realized in the modern time(period) and more particularly in the XIXth century, at the time of the birth of the called(mentioned) as archival modern
Esta tesis de dimensión internacional no tiene como único objetivo restituir une historia de la familia Foix-Bearne-Navarra, a partir de sus archivos. Se trata más bien de poner en evidencia los complejos lazos entre la familia real de Navarra y sus archivos, principalmente entre los siglos XV -XVII, abordando el estatus y el papel de los archivos constituidos en la construcción de la historia, la identidad y la memoria de esta casa real entre el final de la Edad Media y el comienzo de la Edad Moderna.Para la realización de esta tesis, hemos estudiado, entre otros aspectos, dios voluminosos inventarios realizados en el siglo XVI, que nos han permitido conocer la evolución de los archivos conservados en el "trésor" del castillo de Pau. Ambos inventarios marcan una época importante de autoafirmación del poder de la familia real de Navarra, ya que el primero tuvo un gran interés para dicha familia en el proceso de creación de un Estado Moderno en Bearne, bajo el reinado de Enrique II de Navarra, y el segundo (realizado hacia 1580-1582) fue el último inventario de la soberanía, ya que a partir de la llegada de Enrique III de Navarra al trono de Francia, los archivos de Pau se fosilizaron.Hemos comentado al inicio de este resumen la dimensión internacional del sujeto de esta tesis, ya que una parte de los archivos de esta casa real, conservado actualmente en los ADPA está en estrecha relación con documentos custodiados en el Archivo General de Navarra, situado en Pamplona. Este tema ha sido tan poco estudiado como la historia, identidad y memoria de la familia real de Navarra bajo los reinados de Catalina de Foix (1483-1517) y Enrique II (1517-1555). La organización de los archivos forma parte de la construcción política de los reyes de los reyes de Navarra, de una identidad política en la que Bearne ejerce desde fines del siglo XV un papel preponderante (junto a Navarra) en tanto que territorio independiente al margen de Francia. La política desarrollada por estos reyes explica el proceso de centralización en el cartulario de Pau de archivos procedentes de sus diversos dominios (incluso si la mayor parte de los mismos son territorios dependientes de la Corona de Francia).Finalmente, queremos citar el estudio realizado de la evolución de las técnicas de archivo de la documentación del "tresor de chartes" de Pau en el tiempo : En primer lugar, en lo concerniente a la evolución de los modelos de conservación, clasificación y descripción archivística entre el fin de la Edad Media y la época moderna, se lleva a cabo una organización cada vez más clara y eficaz. El inventario de la primera mitad del siglo XVI está dividido por los diversos dominios familiares pero nos muestra una pobre organización que no sigue ningún orden temático ni metódico en la manera en la que los documentos son clasificados. Por el contrario, el registro elaborado a inicios de la década 1580 sigue una organización más metódica, como lo prueba la división de cada título en capítulos temáticos, y la subdivisión de cada capítulo en legajos numerados. Además, a diferencia de los numerosos sistemas de signaturas utilizados por los archivistas en la primera mitad del siglo XVI, quienes elaboraron el inventario de comienzos de los años 1580 optaron por la uniformización en un único sistema de signatura (utilizando las cifras romanas).En lo que concierne a la evolución de los modelos de conservación, de clasificación y de descripción archivística, este estudio nos explica también los sucesivos sistemas de signaturas de la documentación del "trésor de chartes" de Pau, en función de los contextos en los que fueron realizados en la época moderna y más particularmente en el siglo XIX, época del nacimiento de lo que conocemos como la archivística moderna

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that the main theme of Heptameron, by Marguerite de Navarre, is not love, as numerous critics maintain, but the notion of honour. This notion is the real unifying principle that indisputably confers its penetrating unity to the book.
If the kind of dialogue favoured by the Queen creates a polyphony which, at first, may seem destabilizing and hinder the coherence of the book, after reading it carefully, however, one notices that a certain number of guidelines relating to the notion of honour permeate the book. By identifying systems and ensembles, one discovers different sets of correlations--in connection with the notion of honour, that are connected by intelligible links and form homogeneous units that are completely meaningful. This reveals that, behind the obvious conservatism of the characters and members of the storyteller circle of Heptameron, the bivalence of the honour code, in the relationships between men and women, is challenged, even criticized.

This study reconstructs the previously unknown history of the most important dissident group within France before the French Reformed Church formed during the 1550s. From edited and unpublished literary, institutional, diplomatic, and epistolary sources from across Europe, the dissertation demonstrates that King Francis I's sister, Marguerite of Navarre (1492-1549), and a network of more than two hundred nobles, royal officers, humanists, literary writers, and prelates collaborated to promote a reformation of the French church based on their evangelical views. To this end, they attempted to steer Francis I into alliances with Henry VIII, the Protestant powers of the Empire and Switzerland, as well as, for a time, the Pope that favored the adoption of their reform agenda. Within France they strove to disseminate their beliefs by exploiting their administrative powers, sponsoring evangelical preaching, and publishing hundreds of vernacular books, including many adaptations of German Reformation tracts. An opposing conservative party stymied these efforts, yet Marguerite and her network managed, in turn, to prevent it from unleashing full-scale persecution, thereby enabling a broad dissenting movement to grow. Meanwhile, French reformers in exile, led by Guillaume Farel and John Calvin, former members of Marguerite's network, became critical of their erstwhile colleagues and called on French evangelicals to reject the "papal" church. After Marguerite's death, members of her network and their heirs joined two successor parties during the Wars of Religion (1562-1598): the irenic royalists and the unyielding Calvinist Huguenots. Ultimately, the confessional historiographies of the Calvinist and Catholic 'victors' effaced the record of Marguerite and her network's campaign for moderate evangelical renewal. This account revises the received interpretations of Marguerite and the early Reformation in France. Although Marguerite is well-known as a literary figure with heterodox beliefs, her leadership of a dynamic evangelical network has never been seen or reconstructed. This network's actions reveal, moreover, that early sixteenth-century France was not, as it is universally portrayed, a period of "magnificent religious anarchy." These evangelicals were not divergent in their beliefs, disunified, and hence hopelessly ineffective. Amidst growing persecution they failed to secure the adoption of their beliefs, but they did disseminate them and obtain a foothold for religious dissent without which the Reformed churches could not have emerged.

This dissertation analyzes the use of speech (prise de parole ) in Marguerite de Navarre's works of fiction in conjunction with the place that the arguments of the Quarrel about Women hold in her writings.
The texts of the Quarrel about Women, which were very popular in sixteenth century France, tried to prove the superiority or the inferiority of women depending on which side of the debate the writer belonged to. The works of Marguerite de Navarre incorporate numerous arguments of this literary debate to deconstruct them and establish a certain balance between the qualities and the defaults of men and women. Contrary to the writers of the Quarrel who were using as examples women from the Bible or the Antiquity, the Queen of Navarre's works portray mainly characters from daily life in situations that illustrate the way the two sexes use speech differently.
Thus, in the religious poems, women communicate more quickly with the divine because they listen more to their heart which is the receptacle of God. Indeed, the only obstacle that stands between them and mystical union resides in a too strong attachment to a human being, whereas men encounter more hindrances linked, among others, to ambition, science and lust. As for profane poems, they highlight the value of feminine friendship by presenting a free and equal verbal exchange, among women only, based on mutual aid. In the Heptameron, men, in the novellas, hold a greater power than women and it is mirrored in the efficiency of their prise de parole, while there is a certain equality, in the cornice, between the devisants of both sexes. Finally, in the theater, women as well as men deliver God's Word.
Speech which constitutes the most important meeting ground for men and women, in Marguerite's writings, demonstrates how the main criticism directed at women by the detractors of the Quarrel, their unstoppable and slanderous chattering, as well as many other faults are rejected by using examples of women that speak wisely. This makes Marguerite de Navarre's writings modern, because while they deconstruct the binary opposition of man versus woman, with everyday life examples, they do not propose to establish a new hierarchy and thus they are open to plurality.

Many consider Gace Brulé (c1160-c1213) and Thibaut IV, Count of Champagne, (1201-1253) to have been the greatest trouvères. Writers on this subject have not adequately examined this assumption, having focused their energies on such issues as tracking melodic variants of individual works as preserved in different song-books (or chansonniers), the interpretation of rhythm in performance, and creation of modern editions of these songs. This thesis examines the esteem enjoyed by Gace and Thibaut in both medieval and modern times which derives from their exemplarity of, rather than difference from their noble contemporaries.

Alors que la forêt de Lyons est souvent assimilée à une simple forêt-frontière, dix années d’enquête nous obligent à modifier radicalement cette définition géo-historique. Il faut dire qu’entre temps, il a fallu reconsidérer la notion même de forêt qui désignait au haut Moyen Âge, non pas de grandes étendues boisées, mais tout au contraire un espace fortement humanisé où coexistent futaies et taillis, landes et prairies, champs et villages. De cette grande forêt médiévale de Lyons – la plus importante de Normandie avec ses 30 000 ha – entièrement dévolue à l’usage et aux besoins de son détenteur ducal ou royal se dégage alors un pays, lui-même fruit de la sédimentation de quatre espaces nettement identifiés, entre 1100 et 1450. Des multiples séjours des Plantagenêts puis des Capétiens, attestés par plus de 500 chartes signées en forêt de Lyons entre 1100 et 1400 et justifiées soit par la chasse (espace résidentiel), soit par la guerre (espace militaire) résultent en effet un espace politique qui explique la fortune étonnante d’au moins deux favoris issus du pays de Lyons : Guillaume de Longchamps, chancelier d’Angleterre sous Richard Cœur de Lion et Enguerrand de Marigny, le familier de Philippe le Bel. S’ajoutent à cela tous les revenus qu’un espace économique comme la forêt de Lyons procure à son détenteur, en se rappelant l’importance prise par le bois dans l’économie médiévale. En définitive, l’on découvre ainsi que ce pays a fini par produire un véritable écosystème d’une résilience à toute épreuve jusqu’à ce que les années sombres de la fin de la Guerre de cent ans finissent par avoir raison de cet âge d’or qu’a représenté le Moyen Âge pour la forêt de Lyons
Although the forest of Lyons is often defined simply as a border forest, ten years of research has enabled me to make a radical change to this old geographical definition. My reconsideration of even the concept of “forest,” shows that, in the High Middle Ages, the word meant not large stretches of woodlands but, instead, a well-developed space, where timberlands, thickets, heaths, pastures, cultivated fields, and villages coexisted. The medieval forest of Lyons, the most important in all Normandy with its 30,000 hectares, was entirely devoted to the use and necessities of its ducal or royal title-holder, and it emerged as a pays formed by the coalescence of four distinct spaces between 1100 and 1450. The many sojourns of the Plantagenets and then the Capetians — due to hunting (residential space) and various wars (military space) — are documented by more than 500 acts signed in the forest of Lyons between 1100 and 1400. These sojourns produced a political space that explains the stunning careers of at least two royal favorites, natives of the pays of Lyons: William Longchamp, chancellor under Richard the Lionheart, and Enguerrand de Marigny, chief minister of Philip the Fair. Since wood was a necessity in medieval times, the forest of Lyons was also an important economic space because it earned significant revenue for its title-holder. All things considered, it is clear that the pays of Lyons produced a true ecosystem able to survive all hardships until the dark, final period of the Hundred Years War put an end to the Golden Age that the Middle Ages had brought to the forest of Lyons

This dissertation examines representations of legal, theological, and medical modes of case thinking and case narration in the novella collections of four early modern authors: Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), Marguerite de Navarre (1492-1549), Matteo Bandello (c.1485-1562), and Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616). It further investigates how these collections perform and problematize practices of narrating and interpreting cases while framing such practices within the context of the navigation of daily news. Indeed, keen observers of the capacity of informal and formal networks to circulate information and opinions in unpredictable ways and on scales unprecedented, these authors also used the novella genre—and the polysemy of the term “novella”—to intervene in contemporary debates on the value of novelty and on the merits of popularizing expert knowledge. I argue that the early modern novella’s role as a literary mediator between professional forms of the case and popular forms of the news report was instrumental to its durable transnational European success. Over the course of this dissertation, I show how these collections depict the art of storytelling qua case narration as an essential ethical component of professional casuistries and of everyday information exchanges. I draw attention to specific professional inflections of the case-novella-news nexus, in order to highlight how each author conceives—and makes the case for—the indispensability of storytelling to spiritual and civic life. I demonstrate that a juridical approach to cases and novelty takes precedence in Boccaccio’s Decameron. I show that, in contrast, Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron relies on distinctly theological conceptions of cases and news. I proceed to compare the type of moral casuistry found in the Heptaméron to that found in Matteo Bandello’s Novelle. Finally, I investigate the consequences of Cervantes’ predilection for a medical approach to case analysis, novelty, and news in his Novelas ejemplares. The broader ambition of this investigation is twofold: first, to contribute a literary and historical perspective to contemporary methodological debates on the value of case thinking in the human sciences and in the liberal professions, and second, to pave the way for an exploration of the casuistical foundations of modern journalism at a time when its epistemological and ethical priorities are sorely in need of being reassessed.

The collapse of empires in the central and eastern Mediterranean was matched in the far west by the disintegration of Almohad power. The caliphs lost their enthusiasm for the extremist doctrines of Almohadism, and were accused of betraying the principles of their movement. Following military defeat at the hands of Christian kings of Spain at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 the caliph is said to have been strangled by one of his slaves. The Almohad territories in Spain and Tunisia fell into the hands of a new generation of local kings who only paid lip-service to Almohadism. The Hafsid rulers who gained control of Tunis proclaimed themselves successors to the Almohad caliphate, though more as a way of asserting their legitimacy than out of deep commitment to Almohad beliefs. The Berber Marinids broke Almohad power in Morocco in the mid-thirteenth century, after a long struggle. At the same time the Nasrid dynasty established itself in Granada, where it would last until 1492; it adhered strictly to Sunni Islam, not Almohadism. The thirteenth century also saw a major transformation in the Christian western Mediterranean: Pisa’s rivalry with Genoa for mastery over the waters around Corsica and Sardinia culminated in Pisan defeat at the battle of Meloria and the loss of iron-rich Elba in 1284. Although the Pisans did not yet lose control of the large areas of Sardinia they ruled, and even recovered Elba, a new rival to both Pisa and Genoa emerged, not a maritime republic but a group of cities led by Barcelona and backed by the growing power of the king of Aragon and count of Catalonia, James I ‘the Conqueror’. The Mediterranean vocation of the kings of Aragon was not obvious before the thirteenth century. Lords of a small, mountainous kingdom that only toppled the Muslim emirate of Saragossa in 1118, they dissipated much of their energy in attempts to interfere in Christian Castile and Navarre. But in 1134 King Alfonso ‘the Battler’ of Aragon died, having failed to produce an heir; his brother, a monk, was forced out of his convent in order to breed.

This chapter addresses questions of literary and political authority in the writings of two of medieval France’s best known authors, Alain Chartier (c.1385–1430) and Guillaume de Machaut (1300–1377). Chartier was steeped in a rich culture of literary, political, and intellectual debate. His literary debates are heavily inflected by Machaut’s judgment poems. Chartier and Machaut’s positioning within the tradition of the reception of their works marks them as authority figures, or “sites” of authority, and that authority is paradoxically reinforced by textual and material attempts to erase it. In Machaut's “Judgement of the King of Navarre” (1349), the personification of Discretion urges the king of Navarre, appointed judge, to “le contraire effacies” (erase the opposite, v. 3432), or in other words perhaps: to spin the debate to give the desired outcome.