Si Vera est Fama
Type de matériel :
19
The Battle of Othée (September 23, 1408) is no doubt one of the most important military clashes in the fifteenth century. The sequence of events is well known in history: John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, clashed with the communes of Liege, who revolted against their bishop, John of Bavaria, who was then an ally of William of Bavaria, the Count of Hainault. Most historians appear to have limited their presentation to a classical description of the facts up to now. Rarely have they attempted to elucidate the process through which this battle came to crystallize in memory. This survival of Othée in memory is nonetheless due to a great number of perceptions that can actually be traced. Indeed, a corpus of about sixty documents, different in purpose as well as in time or place (France, Netherlands, Germany), permits us to observe an evolution in the way the events were recounted. The obvious difficulty resides in determining what were the local or temporal circumstances that contributed to the making of the "historiographical memory" linked to an event or to a great figure. The divergent views entertained on whether the surname, the Fearless, was appended to John, Duke of Burgundy, before or after Othée, offers a good illustration of this complexity.
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