Laurence Terrier, Université de Neuchâtel (Suisse)
Themes issued from Greco-Roman mythology were transmitted during the Middle Ages through Roman vestiges and several literary traditions. While numerous studies, as early as the 1930s, have noticed mythological subjects within churches, it is the identification of the represented episode that have retained researchers’ attention. We will try to proceed to a global analysis by constituting a corpus of 6th and 7th century capitals. These are essentially anchored in churches of the kingdoms of France and Burgundy. From this corpus, we will try to precise the literary sources used, repertory the frequent or rare topics, and determine the extent to which themes from antiquity integrate the realm of the mirabilia. Our study will focus on the location of the mythological capitals within the ecclesiastic space. We will aim to understand whether the recourse to subjects taken from Ovid or other classical authors participate to a segmentation of ecclesiastic spaces and the articulation of a defined discourse. How do themes from antiquity integrate themselves to the discourse elaborated from biblical episodes, and for what purpose ?