Nocturnes de l'histoire

The heritage holdings of the Simone Veil multimedia library contain documents that reveal the place occupied by pets from the Middle Ages to the modern era. Among other sources, images found in medieval manuscripts are full of pets that are an integral part of people's daily environment, and not just for ornamental purposes.
The Archives municipales de Valenciennes (Valenciennes Municipal Archives) are also home to the Valenciennes Museum. The Municipal Archives of Valenciennes are among the richest in the Hauts-de-France region, enabling us to trace the history of the city since the 13th century, as well as that of the many domestic and non-domestic animals that populated it, such as cats, dogs, pigs and fish. Municipal ordinances, wills, deeds of sale and court records provide a wealth of information on the relationship between humans and animals in the urban environment. Some of these sources will be presented and commented on alongside the lectures.

Animals have a history, and we've known this since Robert Delort's 1984 book. It's a field of history that has taken a long time to build up, and which at the turn of the 2000s underwent a resolutely naturalistic orientation: animals of the past are studied for themselves, and no longer just for what they represent in the construction of the human world, their economies and societies. Historians do, however, have clearer access to documents that explore human-animal relations. The notion of the pet is no longer clear-cut for ancient times, as for a long time we simply shifted the gaze of today's humans onto their animals in ancient times, without taking into account the historicity of representations and attitudes. Medievalist Fabrice Guizard proposes a review of the dog's place in the Western Middle Ages. Man's "best friend" was not always so; and the boundary between the pet attached to a master and the more or less feralized pack of street dogs often seemed quite blurred.

Sarah Rey, a scholar of antiquity, will return to the ways in which animal cries and songs contributed to the soundscape of the Romans, at the risk of confusing humans with beasts: bad litigants officiating in the courts could be said to "bark" like dogs, or women in distress to ululate like owls, and so on. In religious circumstances, animals produced noises that were interpreted as divine messages, whether positive or negative: the song of a bird perceived on the right side was thus considered a good sign, while the howling of a wolf was, on the contrary, a harbinger of public misfortune. Throughout Roman Antiquity, there are numerous situations in which animality and humanity rub shoulders, imitate and adapt to each other.