Christian KIENING : « The Rhetoric of Loss »
The fifteenth century evidences, in a variety of diverse ways, to a growing interest in affective phenomenons and their literary and figurative representations. The author has chosen, from among the vast number of laments in which a veritable phenomenology of mourning is developped, three texts which refer to the same event : the death of Isabel of Bourbon (1465). These texts throw light on the relationship between historical fact and literary imagina-tion as well as on the (anthropological) tension between mourning and consolation.

Martine CLOUZOT : « Suffering to Music »
Although, in its relation to suffering, music is generally reputed for possessing therapeutic virtues, several iconographic and written sources dating from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries attribute a harmful influence to music. This ambivalence was based on the correlation between the intensity of suffering and that of the sonorous quality of musical instruments, which in the Middle Ages were divided into two great families in accordance to the sound volume they produced. Consequently it was according to their high and stri-dent or low and soft sonorities that the instruments were thought to act on suffering, either amplifying it or alleviating it.

Piroska ZOMBORY-NAGY : « The Tears of Christ in the Medieval Exegesis »
According to the New Testament, Jesus wept three times during His lifetime, yet only once does the shedding of tears express His suffering. This paper purposes to examine the exegesis relating to these three occurrences in Christ’s terrestrial life by exploring a corpus of texts reduced to their most important commentaries, which were widely diffused from patristic times to the thirteenth century. Two questions arise : what is the relationship between the suffering and the tears of Christ, and what significance did the tears of Christ hold for the man of the Middle Ages, who aspired to imitate Him ? Despite the growing systematization of exegetic methods, the interpretation of the shedding of the tears of Christ has changed little with time. The tears were con-sidered by the commentators as a sign of Christ’s humanity as well as an expression of His virtues. As a metaphor of suffering, the tears of Christ also add to the effectiveness of the Passion. The tears and the blood of Christ have reciprocal roles, thus offering man the possibility of sparing suffering by shedding tears. The tears appear as a remedy to suffering, rather than as the expression of it.

Anne AUTISSIER : « The Blood of the Flagellants »
In 1349, to avert the Black Death, penitents walked in procession while flagellating themselves to ” appease the wrath of God “, notably in the impe-rial countries near the Marches of the northeastern kingdom of France and in Flanders. They were condemned by the Church, who deemed that the fla-gellants were investing the blood they spilled with a miraculous significance. Surprisingly, the documents left by the penitents themselves do not mention this condemnation. Yet the Church constituted a dossier of proscription ren-dered effective by a papal bull which resulted in the disappearance of the flagellant movement.

David EL KENZ : « The Protestant Man of Suffering in the Times of the Wars of
Religion »
In the age of religious upheavals suffering was a recurrent theme in Reformed apologetics. Antoine de la Roche-Chandieu’s treatise, published soon after the first War of Religion, expounds a discourse which justifies the trials endu-red by Protestants since 1557. His model is the Calvinist martyr, and the account of giving one’s life for one’s faith, from arrest to execution, is organized in correlation to the manifestation of Christ-God. This ” sacred theatre ” strives to disqualify royal justice, to attest to the divine presence at the side of the new Church, and to legitimize the first rebellions. Thus a Reformed culture of Christian suffering did indeed exist, whose axis was the divine union through faith.

Valentin GROEBNER : « Violence in the City : A Few Observations on the Perception of the Injured Body in Nuremberg at the End of the Fifteenth Century »
The paper examines ” every-day ” violence in a large city during the late Middle Ages and how it was perceived in the chronicles, municipal ordinan-ces, and private contracts dealing with damages and compensation these last having been heretofore little known or explored. The compensations for injury and homicides represent considerable sums yet neither the chroniclers nor the municipal authorities seemed to consider violence as a threat to the city, and still less as the symptom of a ” crisis “. The perception of bodily injuries and homicide cases, and the laws regulating them fall within the system of signs representing social and political order which distinguishes ” just ” violence from ” unjust/false ” violence. This rule of proceeding results in the dissembling of physical violence and its consequences behind order, and it is only through the momentary disruption caused by the violent occur-rence itself that the wounded and suffering body becomes visible.

Beate SCHUSTER : « The Representations of Prostitution and the Perception in the Urban Society in Germany (XIIIth-XVIth Centuries) »
The image of the prostitute in German cities during the late Middle Ages was essentially inspired by ecclesiastical tradition, which used representations of such women to exemplify human fate. Prostitutes were considered as ” free ” and ” poor ” women deprived of protection, or as women seduced by the material world. Their weakness rendered the community responsible for their care. However, at the end of the Middle Ages, a new image born of a morality independent of religious tradition prevailed : the prostitute was considered as a whore, using her power to abuse men. This interpretation reflects a new anthropological and community conception in the cities, and one which justified the expulsion and the mutilation of women who did not comply with the ethics of urban morality.

Patrick BOUCHERON : « Of Cruelty as a Principle of Government. The “Iniquitous” Princes of the Italian Renaissance Reflected in the Mirror of French Romanticism »
This paper proposes a study interrelating two subjects : the anthropological structure of the tyranny of the Italian princes at the close of the Middle Ages, and the fascination they inspired in several nineteenth-century French writers. Starting with Stendhal’s works, the study endeavors to define the cruel energy exerted by the Italian princes, whose evil deeds were only equal to their debauchery. Striving solely toward their own pleasure, tyrannies worked toward their own ruin : the dreaded prince was thus a prisoner of his own power. Nor did the calculating prince of the fifteenth century cease to be cruel ; although he cast aside futile turpitudes, he still used cruelty for the good of the State. What fascinated Stendhal and Victor Hugo was the distant, abhorred power of the tyrants. In this they are the inheritors of the late Middle-Age French thinkers, who had already made the distinction bet-ween fear of the tyrant and love of the king.

Christiane MATTKE : « Discipline and the Switch in the Iconography of Pedagogy »
The switches shown in medieval images depicting education seem to indicate that corporal punishment was customary. By means of an iconographic analy-sis of the initial letters in the illuminated thirteenth century manuscripts of the Proverbs Bible, representing Solomon teaching his son, this study strives to demonstrate that the switches have the ambiguous significance of an object at once pratical and symbolic. This significance finds its equivalent in the notion of disciplina as elaborated by the medieval pedagogical thought from the twelfth century onwards.