Les deux vies de saint Riquier : du latin médiatique au latin hiératique

The Two Lives of Saint Riquier : from Mediatic to Hieratic Latin - By applying the principles of retrospective sociolinguistic analysis to a specific example of narrative, in this case the rewriting of the Life of a Merovingian saint — Saint Riquier — during Carolingian times, this paper demonstrates how it resulted in the loss of its mediatorial character between the traditional (spoken and written) language of the learned and the language spoken by the illiterate. On this occasion it may be noted that the complicity existing between the narrator and his public, manifest in the 7th century, had vanished in the 8th. Thus what had been a popularizing (mediatic) narrative, came to be an aristocratizing (hieratic) narrative.