The De praedestinatione of John Scottus Eriugena was intended as a contribution to a controversy sparked off by Gottschalk of Orbais concerning predestination. This work met with trenchant criticism and condemnation even though it firmly rejected Gottschalk’s views on double predestination. One of the reasons for this hostile reception was undoubtedly Eriugena’s singular conception of the freedom of will, a subject I intend to discuss elsewhere. In the present text, however, I would like to focus on another important cause of (...) the rejection of Eriugena’s treatise. In my opinion, this second reason was a pre-scholastic project of rationalization of the faith in the spirit of St. Augustine and using the method of Boethius and Martianus Capella. It would appear that Eriugena’s contemporaries were not ready for the favorable reception of his idea of the vera philosophia that was the same as the vera religio. Yet, as Goulven Madec once rightly observed, the vera ratio of Scotus was closely bound up with the lux mentium which is nothing else than God revealing himself in the human language of the Scriptures. Eriugena’s masters and models were the Church Fathers and his intention was to continue their efforts to achieve an understanding of the faith in his own, personal way. (shrink)

Anatomo-functional studies in humans point out that handedness and language-related functional laterality are not correlated – except during language production; and that the convergence of language and hand control is located in the precentral gyrus, whereas executive functions required by movement imitation and phonological and semantic processing converge onto Broca's area. Multiple domains are likely to be actors in language evolution. Footnotes1 Nathalie Tzourio-Mazoyer is the corresponding author for this commentary.

Le vicomte Théodore Hersart de La Villemarqué a longtemps été accusé d’avoir inventé de toutes pièces les chansons arthuriennes qui apparaissent dans son recueil de chants populaires de la Bretagne, le Barzaz-Breiz. Cet article tente de mettre en évidence les restaurations effectuées par le collecteur sur ces chants arthuriens et de montrer le rôle joué par certains pourvoyeurs de « chansons nouvelles ». Viscount Théodore Hersart de La Villemarqué was accused of fabricating the Arthurian songs collected in his Barzaz-Breiz, the (...) first famous collection of popular songs from Brittany published in the 19th century. This paper aims to demonstrate how the editor actually rewrote the texts and to shed some light on La Villemarqué’s relationships with the persons who gave him access to these “new songs”. (shrink)

La collecte des fonds Raymonde Debray-Genette et Gérard Genette témoigne de l’importance de mobiliser des compétences à la fois scientifiques et archivistiques dans ce type d’entreprise mémorielle. Les archives Genette, ensemble de documents produits sur support papier et sur support numérique, ont en effet été sauvées au lendemain de la disparition de Gérard Genette par le service des archives de l’EHESS avec le support du Centre de recherches sur les arts et le langage. L’article présente les phases du travail, de (...) la découverte des archives à leur mise en carton pour classement en vue de leur mise à disposition au Grand équipement documentaire du Campus Condorcet. Il propose en outre des pistes de réflexion sur les procédures de l’archivage des documents produits par les chercheurs en sciences humaines et sociales. (shrink)