Writing the sacred in Gautier de Coincy’s Miracles of Notre Dame: Spiritual issues of a language and style
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This article addresses the role of the sacred in the writing of Gautier de Coincy. By analyzing the relationship that Miracles of Notre Dame establishes between the question of the choice of language (Latin or French) and that of style (simple or ornate), we show that the author reconfigures the oppositional relations between two languages: the relation between Latin and the vernacular no longer involves a competition between a sacred and profane language respectively, but rather between two different types of relation to the divine, coinciding with the Isidorian separation between sacrum and religiosum. Whereas the use of Latin expresses the emergence of a God who only reveals himself in order to show his inaccessible nature, French expresses the possibility of a form of sacred that will inhabit the reader’s heart. Latin then appears to be a religious language in the Isidorian sense of the word: the language of tradition and the reproduction of rites that do not involve the interiority of the person practicing them. French then becomes the only truly sacred language, that of an intimate meeting with God.
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