Writing and rewriting the life of the Virgin in Iceland in the Middle Ages (13th-14th centuries), "Maríu saga" : study and translation

• Main Author: Fairise, Christelle
• Other Authors: Toulouse 2, Université catholique de Louvain (1970-.), Lacroix, Daniel, Burnet, Régis, Van Hemelryck, Tania
• Format: Thesis
• Language: French
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: Moyen âge; Maríu saga; Vies de la Vierge; Sagas islandaises; Littérature hagiographique; Évangiles apocryphes; Mariologie; Théologie médiévale; Middle Ages; Lives of the Virgin; Icelandic Sagas; Hagiographical Literature; Apocryphal Gospels; Mariology; Medieval Theology; relig; litt; La Vierge; Marian; Vierge; Iceland; Islande
• Online Access: http://www.theses.fr/2017TOU20053

Maríu saga is an anonymous hagiographic saga relating the story of Mary’s life, from her Conception to her Assumption, written in the vernacular and composed in the monastic milieu between the last third of the thirteenth century and the second half of the fourteenth century in Iceland. Coupled with an unprecedented translation of the text, this dissertation offers a new approach to Maríu saga that I situate within the long literary and theological tradition of the Lives of the Virgin – these Marian biographic homilies which draw on apocryphal gospels were composed by monks and theologians from the seventh to the tenth century in the Byzantine Empire –, and that I put into the European medieval literary and cultural context in order to examine the literary and doctrinal issues raised by the act of writing and rewriting the life of the Virgin in Iceland in the Middle Ages. I successively consider Maríu saga from different perspectives: in a first part, from the history of the reception of biblical and parabiblical texts; in a second part, from an historical and a philological aspect; in a third part, from a literary point of view; and in a fourth part, from a theological angle. My aim is to demonstrate through the study of its poetics and its doctrine that, like the medieval ecclesiastical lives of Mary, Maríu saga bears specific features of its cultural area of its time: medium between literature and theology, this work is a narrative hagiographic text that presents the double interest of being the witness both to the practice of hagiographic rewriting in the vernacular and to the doctrinal development and the evolution of the theological reflection on Mary, and in fact on Christ, in medieval Iceland. La Maríu saga est une saga hagiographique anonyme d’origine monastique faisant le récit de la vie de Marie, de sa conception à son Assomption, rédigée en langue vernaculaire et composée entre le dernier tiers du XIIIe siècle et la seconde moitié du XIVe siècle en Islande. Assortie d’une traduction inédite du ...