Un savoir ­comptable dans la chanson de geste au xii^e siècle ? Quelques hypothèses

It seems that certain formal processes proper to the twelfth-century chansons de geste were borrowed from contemporaneous accounting knowledge, which was itself inscribed within the growing use of writing practices in the Ecclesia. The chansons thus testify to the formalisation of the accounting skills of the secular aristocracy and, consequently, its resistance to an administrative geography (in the process of being constituted in the Gregorian period) exclusively polarised by the churches.