Face aux textes médiévaux compacts et accompagnés souvent de peu de signes de ponctuation, certains travaux philologiques les découpent arbitrairement en paragraphes sans respecter leur structure originelle pour des raisons de confort de la lecture. Daniel Poirion 3 pense que les lettrines des manuscrits contiennent des indications essentielles sur la lecture et l’interprétation des œuvres à l’époque des copistes, les effacer, c’est un peu comme faire passer un bulldozer sur un champ de fouilles archéologiques. Basée sur deux manuscrits du XV e siècle et une édition du XVI e siècle, notre étude a pour objectif de faire une étude comparative sur la valeur linguistique des lettrines et ses rapports avec la ponctuation, ainsi que la possibilité de différentes interprétations du même texte.

In the Middle Ages, texts were characterized by a compact succession of letters without spacing and few punctuation marks. Before the codification of the punctuation, dropped initials were generally used by the manual copyists for indicating visually the beginning of books, chapters or paragraphs. They were distinguished by larger format and came with adornments. Their main functions consist in dividing up into significant unities. In fact, after the invention of the typography, humanist editors continued to use dropped initials for fear of changing drastically the habit of reading. Some of philologists, when they present the medieval texts, cut the texts arbitrarily without respecting their original structure because of the comfort reading, but these dropped initials contain essential indications of the reading and possible interpretations of the texts at the time of copyists. Based on two manuscripts of the 15th century and an edition of the sixteenth century, our study aims to make a comparative analysis of the arrangement of the dropped initials and its connections with the punctuation in order to bring out different possibilities of the reading of the same text.