Lire l'ambiguïté pour voir l'ambivalence : la figure entre-deux de merlin dans les manuscrits enluminés du Merlin et de la suite vulgate (XIIIe-XIVe siècle)

International audienceAt the beginning of the 13th century, Robert de Boron depicts in his Merlin the creation of the Antichrist : son of an incubus and a virgin, Merlin was designed to serve the devils' projects. However, God, sentient being facing the repentance of Merlin's mother, reversed his tragic destiny while offering him a gift of prophecy. Here begins the tormented life of the One who seeks to rid himself of his daemonic condition with the help of his zeal to perform God's work. Therefore, this providential path is rutted, strewn with obstacles whose lineage is the main impediment. Coming after the immense work of Jerôme Baschet, Martin Aurell and many others researchers, there is no need to prove anymore the considerable influence of kinship in the definition of social relationship, collective imagination and literary creation. Created without a man's seed, Merlin is designated by the periphrasis "enfant sans père"; a formula which is far from being insignificant since it annihilates his paternal filiation and consequently his lineage, and his heritage. Herewith, the text plays on the ambiguity of Merlin's marvellous birth, rejecting the spiritual kinships that he maintains respectively with the devil and God. Contrary to the text, the illuminations defend the different filiations of Merlin, that is why the kinship should be seen as an issue of his representations. On a number of fronts, the study of the illuminated manuscripts of the Merlin accounts for a counterintuitive game between textual ambiguity and visual ambivalence, with a great semantic richness