Quand le Malin fait de l'esprit. Le rire au Moyen Âge vu depuis l'hagiographie

摘要

Witty Devil: Laughter in the Middle Ages as seen from Hagiology. L. Moulinier. As a passion of the soul expressing itself loudly through the body, laughter was generally held in great suspicion by the medieval Church, especially in monastic life, where it was considered as the enemy of silence and seriousness. Comical elements in edifying texts, telling of the life of an abbot and an abbess in the perspective of their canonizations, are all the more surprising. This study intends to analyze the function of such episods in hagiographic narrative (on the basis of two twelfth-century Vitae, on Bernard de Clairvaux and Hildegard of Bingen) and the mechanism and scope of a certain type of laughter in the Middle Ages.