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This article provides basic facts about the career and research of J.-P. Poly, a specialist in legal and social history of the Middle Ages and one of the most influential and interesting French medievalists of our days. It also contains a short characteristic of his article published in this issue of the journal.

The article suggests a hypothesis that in so-called periods of «civil wars» (1130–1240) and «epoch of greatness» or «storhetstiden» (1240–1319) in Norway there was prospective and retrospective dynastic planning as part of the state policy. It provided by order of Sverrir, an impostor, who become the king of Norway, and his successors («the Sverrir clan») this planning and realized by the compilers of sagas and laws who were in their service. The main methods of this planning were manipulation of historical memory reflected in the monuments of historical writing, and also name-giving. By the use of these methods within the dynasty of the Norwegian kings from its legendary founder Harald Fairhair and the «Sverrir clan» as its part were modeled linages as specific mental schemes. They did not reflect real agnatic structures as representations of kinship relations, which had to connect real and imaginary ancestors and descendants. These constructions were intended for legitimizing of the origin and rights to power both Sverrir himself and those representatives of the royal dynasty he descended from as well as his own offspring. Lineages were composed both of those members of the royal family who had the same names, which made the descendants like their ancestors, and on the basis of similar kinship configurations that appeared as a result of marriages between representatives of the royal dynasty and the Norwegian nobility. The need of dynastic planning was closely linked to changes in Norwegian inheritance and family law. The article shows how the situation within the «Sverrir clan» influenced to the formation of succession laws of 1273 and 1302, and the assertion of the principle «Norway is the king’s honor» led to the contamination of their norms with the general inheritance law ones.

This article is an attempt to identify the written sources of the chronicle of the French monk Dudo of Saint-Quentin created in the early 11th century and entitled «De moribus et actis primorum Normaniae ducum», known also as «Historia Normannorum». It is the first text dedicated to the history of Normandy and a text based mainly on the oral information obtained by Dudo from the dukes of Normandy and their entourage. This fact attracted many modern scholars whereas Dudo’s written sources received much less attention which hinders attempts to explain certain factual lacunae in his text and occasional mismatches of his reports with the reports of other authors of the same period, something which for a long time discredited this chronicle in the eyes of researchers. Striving to identify the written sources which Dudo employed while composing his chronicle, the author clarifies the chronicler’s literary aims and the particularities of his work with available sources. This, in turn, helps to properly assess the originality of his work and the reliability of the reports contained in his chronicle.

John Barbour (ca.1320–1395) has been justly acknowledged as the founder of literature in Scots. The Bruce, his monumental achievement, is at once a metrical romance, a biography of Robert I, King of Scots, and his loyal adherents,and a historical chronicle which became the national epic of Scotland. The first full Russian translation of this outstanding work is continued below, with an introductory article and commentary. The original metre is retained.

The paper is devoted to the perception of the political ideas of the French philosopher Jean Bodin in the English intellectual space of the 17th century. English political thought during the 17th century more than once changed its direction responding to political crises in the country. The authors of the pre-revolutionary period, the Civil War and the Stuart Restoration evaluated the theory of sovereignty in different ways and saw different ways to implement it. In this context the quoting of Jean Bodin, already then recognized as an author of the theory of state sovereignty, often appeared in the writings of English authors. The number of references to Bodin makes it difficult to study the reception of Bodin’s political ideas in seventeenth-century England through a frontal review of these writings. The author of the paper has compiled a selection of English works from the period 1576 to 1700, which cited Bodin’s treatise «Six books of the Commonwealth». The resulted base consists of 298 works of numerous authors. Throughout the 17th century the public interest in Bodin varied depending on the political situation. The peaks of his citations coincided with political crises in England; they became the foundation for research work with the collected corpus of sources. The study This attempts to trace how, in the process of reading, different evaluation and interpretation of Bodin’s treatise, English readers influenced the subsequent perception of the text and its author.