Sophie Albert
2024-2025
Marcel Bataillon
Sorbonne Université
Palm cults and cultures. An archeology of discursive practices around the palms and palmeras (palm trees) of Elche (Spain). 16th-21st centuries
Biography
Following the publication of her thesis on a 13th century Arthurian novel, Sophie Albert obtained a position as a PhD lecturer at Sorbonne Université (Paris, France) in 2011. Since then, her scientific activities have been oriented in two different directions. In French medieval literature, she works on hagiographic and mystical texts written in vernacular language in the late 13th-early 14th century. In Hispanic studies, she researches on objects of Spanish tangible or intangible heritage whose history extends from the Middle Ages to contemporary times.
In both fields, he pays special attention to the tensions between the profane and the sacred and to the rewriting, reconfiguration and hybridization of the Catholic religious. He approaches the question of the norm from several perspectives: the dogma of institutional religion, authoritative discourses on the past, tradition, heritage, as well as the codification of gender, its boundaries and transgressions. At the methodological level, she uses philology, cultural anthropology, ethnography, gender and queer studies.
Research project
Sophie Albert's project consists of the elaboration of a book about the palms and palm trees of Elche (Spain) in the modern and contemporary periods. It outlines a history of the discourses and practices developed around the palm, a plant transformed into a cultural object (both cultual and aesthetic) in its uses, and into a motif and protagonist in the “literacy” produced in Elche. It emphasizes the identity symbolism of this object, in its cultural and anthropological dimensions.
Without aiming for a “total history”, it studies key moments in which new discursive configurations about palms and palm trees emerge. It develops this purpose in three parts. The first focuses on the religious symbolism of palms and palm trees in the 17th and 18th centuries. The second deals with the social and gender representations that were associated with the palm grove at two points in the 20th century: the 1920s and the 1950s. The third, of an ethnographic nature, studies the current reappropriations and reinterpretations of the palm.
Selected publications
2023. “Réinventer le Graal au début du XXIe siècle. Le calice de doña Urraca (León, Espagne)”, in Patrick Fraysse et Sylvie Sagnes (éd.), Vivre et faire vivre le Moyen Âge, Montpellier, Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, pp. 91-112.
2023. “Hélène à la croisée des genres dans le manuscrit de Turin, Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria, L.II.14 (1311)”, in Nadine Henrard et Marjolaine Raguin (éd.), Représentations et voix de femmes face à la guerre sainte au Moyen Âge (XIIe-XVe siècle), Paris, Classiques Garnier, pp. 201-218.
2021. “L’affaire Marin·e. Noms, genres et statuts dans la Vie de Marine d’Egipte viergene (seconde moitié du XIIIe siècle)”, in Christine Ferlampin-Acher, Fabienne Pomel et Emese Egedi-Kovács (éd.), “Par le non conuist an l’ome”. Études d’onomastique littéraire médiévale, Budapest, Collège Eötvös József ELTE – CELLAM Université Rennes 2, pp. 397-412.
2020. “Les aventures du Sant Calze de Valence : quand la fiction se fait objet de foi et de mémoire”, Perspectives médiévales [En ligne], 41, La vie postmédiévale des artéfacts médiévaux, dir. Véronique Dominguez-Guillaume et Sébastien Douchet. URL : journals.openedition.org/peme/23205
2019. “La Judiada dans le Misteri d’Elx : un scandale ?”, in François Lecercle et Clotilde Thouret (éd.), Fabula / Les colloques, Théâtre et scandale (I). URL : www.fabula.org/colloques/document5886.php
