La ville de Douai a connu une « révolution documentaire » au Moyen Âge central dont on essaie de montrer ici en quoi elle a pu se distinguer des rapports avec l’écrit entretenus auparavant par les sociétés locales. Ces pratiques scripturaires propres à une époque sont désignées comme « régime de scripturalité ». On a pu en distinguer sept successifs depuis l’apparition de l’écriture dans le Douaisis à la fin de l’Âge du fer. Cet article entend les retracer dans une étude de cas à l’échelle de ce petit pays. À la pseudo-scripturalité préromaine, succède la scripturalité complexe du Haut-Empire, qui semble traverser une crise durant l’Antiquité tardive. Celle-ci débouche sur la scripturalité restreinte chrétienne de l’époque mérovingienne. La vallée de la Scarpe abrite ensuite un foyer de la Renaissance carolingienne, période caractérisée par un redéploiement de l’écrit vers les sphères de gouvernement laïc. Dans les décennies entourant l’An mil, la scripturalité tend à être confinée au monde monastique, mais à partir des années 1060 environ, l’écrit s’ouvre socialement, son usage s’intensifie, Douai accueille une école de grammaire. On entre dans la « révolution de l’écrit ». L’histoire de la scripturalité du Douaisis au cours de ce long millénaire n’a été ni cyclique, ni linéaire. Apports et transformations successives ont permis la transition des scripturalités antiques vers celles du Premier Moyen Âge qui ont préparé un Second Moyen Âge scripturaire inauguré autour du seuil du xiie siècle.
The Seven Ages of the Written Word. The Attitudes and Pratices towards Literacy in the Douaisis (1st c. BC – 12th c. AD). In the 12th and the 13th centuries, like other parts of Western Europe, the town of Douai, which is situated in the French-speaking area of the county of Flanders, went through a “documentary revolution”. Local society developed new attitudes to the written word which could be described as a “system of attitudes and pratices towards literacy” (régime de scripturalité). Through a case study on the local scale of the Douaisis (the little country around Douai), this paper identifies and characterizes seven successive systems of attitudes and pratices towards literacy between the Iron Age and the last decades of the 12th century. (1) The first is perceptible in the use of pseudo-literacy on Gallic coinage in the 1st century BC. (2) The Latin literacy system of the Roman High Empire (1st-3rd centuries AD) appears to have been more complex and socially more extended (including the tile maker Titica), though local literacy seems to have been less dynamic in that area than in other parts of the Roman world. (3) Late Antiquity (4th-6th centuries) proved a time of crisis : local society was affected by the settlement of Frankish groups and evidence of literacy practices rarifies, though administrative literacy could have survived. (4) During the 7th-8th centuries, a kind of Christian restricted literacy can be observed, clerks and monks were apparently the last users of the Latin written word while pseudo-literacy coinage seems to reappear. (5) However, the Scarpe river valley scriptoria from the 9th to the mid-10th centuries were very active in the Carolingian Renaissance with masters like Hucbald of Saint-Amand and lay people were sometimes involved in pragmatic literacy. The first attempts of vernacular literacy can be noticed as the split between Latin and Romance language became effective. (6) Between c. 950 and c. 1050, with the withdrawal of the cultural and administrative networks of post-Carolingian times, a new type of clerical restricted literacy appeared. The Church apparently exercised a monopoly on the written word. (7) At least, from the 1060s to the 1170s, the rise in the production of charters and other pragmatic documents, the local presence of heresy (and thus of “textual communities”) and the reputation of the grammar school of Douai signal the first stages of the local “documentary revolution”. The thousand-year-old history of literacy in the Douaisis was neither cyclic, nor linear. Despite the disappearance or the transformation of some elements, and without adopting a teleological view, a cumulative logic does prove at work, allowing us to identify these successive systems of attitudes and pratices towards literacy. Ancient literacy ended between the 4th and the 6th century. It was followed by First Medieval Literacy, itself replaced by Second Medieval literacy in the 12th century.
