Daisy Delogu has been invited by the Collège de France assembly at the suggestion of Pr Patrick Boucheron.
This lecture will bring together poetic sources (the Roman de la Rose, poems and sayings by Guillaume de Machaut, poems by Philippe de Vitry and Pierre d'Ailly) and political sources (notably Nicole Oresme's translations ofAristotle' s morality ) to identify the cultural imaginary that develops around the " serf ". Defined as such according to moral, legal, amorous, political or economic criteria, the " serf " as a category proves profoundly unstable, designating not so much a fixed identity as a condition always in the making ; one can be " serf " because of one's attachments, the nature of one's obligations, or the operations of the power (or powers) to which an individual finds himself subject. In this way, the " serf " could represent the awareness of precariousness that haunted writers at the end of the Middle Ages, and which, we suggest, is not unrelated to our present-day society.
