| Summary: | MarÃu 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 MarÃu 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 MarÃu 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, MarÃu 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. (LALE - Langues et lettres) -- UCL, 2017
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