Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Prêcher coram Papa Urbano V . Édition et commentaire d’un sermon de Nicole Oresme

2008; Volume: 19; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1484/j.rm.5.101164

2295-9696

Mathieu Caesar,

Medieval and Early Modern Justice

On 24 December 1363 Nicole Oresme gave a sermon before Urban V and the college of cardinals in Avignon. This sermon, known in fourteen manuscript copies and several editions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, has always been interpreted as a virulent attack on the morals of the Church at the end of the fourteenth century. During the Great Schism, and again during the Protestant Reformation, Nicole Oresmewas considered as one of the heralds who had foreseen and announced the division within the Church. An analysis of this sermon, however, shows that the discourse of Nicole Oresme should be placed among the sermons coram Papa, constructed according to precise stylistic and rhetorical rules. Yet it would be wrong to consider the sermon a simple stylistic exercise. The discourse is also an invitation to Urban V to continue the reforms he had undertaken within the Church. From this point of view it constitutes a preliminary stage in the reforming ideas that Nicole Oresme would develop in his translation-commentary of Aristotle’s Politics.