Conter et compter : le récit bref et la «révolution commerciale» du XIIIe siècle

During the second half of the 12th century, the redefinition of the literary landscape happens at the same time as a great economic growth that is known to the historians as the “commercial revolution of the 13th century” (1160-1330). This cultural and social context seems to have permitted the emergence of numerous narrative forms in the vernacular language that are characterised by their brevity (pious tales, dits, fables, fabliaux, lais and miracles), most of which won’t survive the end of the period. Starting from this observation, this thesis examines the links that unites the récits brefs to the commercial discourses, showing that the literary forms characterised by an economy of the verse have not only been the perfect vehicle to transmit and problematize the merchants’ ideas, but also that they have instituted themselves on their capacity to create narratives from contemporary issues. Poetic laboratories of the cultural ideas, the brief forms have been at the leading edge of the social discourse and have participated in sharpening the ways to conceive the notions of value, money, exchange and debt, during an important moment of the development of the economical thought in the Middle Ages. Divided into eight chapters, this thesis examines first the vernacular commercial lexicon, before making more in-depth studies of discursive issues specific to the time. If the commercial vocabulary is already used in first monuments of the French language, we notice that the works produced from the 1160s use it more frequently and give them monetary meanings (chapter 1). Throughout the thirteenth century, this vocabulary has a varied use, since it expresses both the exchanges on earth and the Christian idea of redemption. The analysis of the concrete, abstract and “ethico-economic” meanings of this lexicon allows us to take a first step in the corpus of short forms in order to examine their specificities (chapter 2). Noting that short forms do not use economics terms in the same way, we were then able to establish a true typology of genres from their respective uses (chapter 3 and chapter 4). In the second part of this thesis, the narrative components of the short stories were examined through the lens of the economic discourse of the “commercial revolution”. Stories about the sale of a horse have reinvested the legal notion of a justum pretium by problematizing the exchange of goods deemed to be equivalent (chapter 5). The question of monetary fraud has fuelled a number of intrigues where unequal exchanges are accomplished and where one character tries to obtain a surplus over another, at a time when theologians are debating the very notion of superhabundantia (chapter 6). Revamped throughout the Middle Ages, according to the tastes of the day and according to the changes of attitudes towards usury, the Miracle of Abraham the Jew made it possible to transmit the idea that the monetary debts are not thought independently of divine debts (chapter 7). Finally, the last chapter is interested in the idea of "narrative economy", which does not appear in the Latin poetic arts, but which is made very sensitive by disproportionate short narratives who do not respect the constraint of brevity (chapter 8).

Keyphrases: medieval literature, poetics, short narratives, literature and economy