Faire Translater, Faire Historier: Charles V's Bible Historiale and the Visual Rhetoric of Vernacular Sapience more

FAIRE TRANSLATER, FAIRE HISTORIER: CHARLES V’S BIBLE HISTORIALE AND THE VISUAL RHETORIC OF VERNACULAR SAPIENCE Aden Kumler The celebrated library of Charles V of France (1338–80) possessed no fewer than three copies of the Bible historiale, Guiard des Moulins’s French language translation of Petrus Comestor’s Historia Scholastica.1 A fourth manuscript should be added to this tally: Cambridge, Houghton Library, MS Typ 555, a richly illuminated Bible historiale dated to 1373 (Fig. 1).2 The manuscript’s illumination is principally the work of the Master of the Livre du Sacre de Charles V and the Master of the Coronation of Charles VI; two artists who collaborated on several royal commissions in Paris during the second half of the fourteenth-century.3 Although the quantity and quality of the manuscript’s miniatures alone might suggest a royal recipient for this Bible historiale, François Avril’s discovery of an effaced royal ex-libris on the verso of the second volume’s final folio conclusively established that the Houghton Bible historiale was once the possession of the Valois king, Charles V.4 As Avril has noted, five out of thirteen extant manuscripts bearing such autograph inscriptions of the king’s name may be identified as works containing Scripture, a figure that attests to Charles V’s avid interest in Holy Writ.5 The Houghton Bible historiale is but one of many vernacular translations that belonged to Charles V.6 It was the manuscript’s images, however, that particularly rewarded the king’s attention with a polemical demotion of Old Testament Hebrew text and a polemical promotion of fourteenth-century French as a language capable of transmitting divine wisdom to a king celebrated for his sagesse.7 Although we may never know who devised the Houghton manuscript’s visual program, the testimony of its miniatures suggests that when Charles V wrote his ex-libris he put his mark on a manuscript that made a polemical contribution to his authorization of the French vernacular. In his Bible historiale Guiard des Moulins (b. 1215–d. ca. 1312–22) did not simply translate Petrus Comestor’s Historia Scholastica (completed ca. 1169–73) but rather built upon the structured armature of Petrus Comestor’s work, selectively including his predecessor’s encyclopedic commentary while expanding its incipit-style referencing of the Vulgate.8 The result was a work that fused scholastic organization with a vernacular translation of much of Jerome’s Bible. As 90 © 2008 by the Board of Trustees of Western Michigan University Faire translater, faire historier 91 Fig. 1. Frontispiece. Bible historiale; Cambridge, Houghton Library, Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, MS Typ 555, vol. 1, fol. 1r. (Photo: By permission of the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library.) 92 Aden Kumler Samuel Berger’s pioneering study first noted, Guiard’s magnum opus was subject to significant accretions within his lifetime, resulting in a work that Berger termed La Bible historiale complétée; a version of the text supplemented by additional scriptural translations thought to consist, by and large, of borrowings from the still evolving ‘Thirteenth-Century Bible.’9 These supplements expanded the translated biblical matter to include the non-historical books of the Vulgate, texts that Petrus Comestor had excluded from his Historia Scholastica and which thus remained untranslated by Guiard des Moulins. That Guiard’s translation was immediately deemed insufficient may be inferred from the fact that scholars have yet to identify a single manuscript containing Guiard’s text without interpolations of additional scriptural translation.10 An increase in the sheer volume of translated biblical text is not the only feature to significantly distinguish the so-called Bible historiale complétée from Guiard’s originally intended work and Petrus Comestor’s Latin text. As Rosemarie McGerr has observed, the Bible historiale is, with very few extant exceptions, a text that circulates with images.11 As the Bible historiale has yet to be the subject of a published comprehensive study, we may only generalize about the text’s visual tradition, relying for the most part on articles devoted to single manuscripts and catalog entries.12 A survey of such published sources does, however, reveal that a staggering amount of illumination was executed for this extremely popular work.13 Examination of a sample of seventeen manuscripts of the Bible historiale ranging in attributed date from 1330 to ca. 1460 reveals that the text was accompanied by a minimum number of 57 miniatures.14 The two-volume Bible historiale executed for Charles V, now separated between the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris and the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, contains 337 miniatures in its first volume alone, a maximal visual treatment.15 In general, the reign of Charles V seems to inaugurate a period in the manuscript tradition characterized by an increase in the work’s visual component and, accordingly, the expansion of the text from a single volume to a two volume set. Not only do de luxe manuscripts of the Bible historiale produced after the middle of the fourteenth century attest to a significant increase in the visualization of the text, as a group they also witness the emergence of an increasingly standardized visual program for the text in which the bulk of the visual cycle is distributed among the various books of the bible in the form of introductory one-column wide miniatures. This organizational structure is found in manuscripts of the text predating the period in question; an innovative aspect of the visual structure of midfourteenth-century de luxe exemplars is the use of large miniatures placed as visual prefaces at the beginning of each volume of the Bible historiale. Medieval frontispiece miniatures often served as visual finding aids, offering the reader-viewer a visual précis or inventory of the texts they introduce. In Faire translater, faire historier 93 the large prefatory miniatures executed for mid-fourteenth-century Bible historiales scholars have discerned an especially argumentative framing of the entire text that follows. Analyzed in this light, several manuscripts of the Bible historiale emerge as text-image complexes wherein scripture is translated, textually commented upon, and pictorially glossed by introductory images. In an interpretation of the large miniature that opens London, British Library, Harley MS 4381, M. W. Evans has identified a Boethian summa invoking scholastic sapientia as the inheritor of classical achievements (Fig. 2).16 Examining the frontispiece to St. Petersburg, National Library of Russia, MS Fr.F.v.I.1/1–2, Jeffrey Hamburger discerns a prescriptive trajectory that leads “from the ‘Book of Nature,’ at the bottom, . . . through the ‘Book of Scripture’ before culminating in the Tabernacle of heaven,” structuring both the page and the viewer’s encounter with its vernacular translation and painted image (Fig. 3).17 In short, such frontispiece images act as argumentative introductions, particularizing and rhetorically inflecting the texts and images that the reader-viewer encounters in subsequent folios. What then should we make of Bibles historiales that do not seem to particularize their contents in such a fashion? The Houghton Bible historiale is a case in point: the manuscript opens with an image that at a first glance is more platitude than polemic.18 (Fig. 4) Seated at the center of the miniature, God, graced with a cruciform halo, holds an orb of dominion in his left hand and gestures in benediction with his right. The four Evangelists, grouped immediately around Him, are depicted at their writing desks. Accompanied by their symbols, each of the Evangelists is at work on a scroll bearing the Latin version of his name. This iconographic type of God in Majesty surrounded by the four Evangelists is a familiar image, often found accompanying the Canon pages of contemporary Missals. The Houghton Bible historiale’s frontispiece, however, adds two elements that should give us pause. The object of God’s benediction is a clothed altar upon which the elements of the Eucharistic sacrifice are clearly articulated in white and gold. The sacrament’s pendant is found in a parallel position against the right edge of the miniature. Here on an altar we see the round-topped Tablets of the Old Law, which bear no writing, but are instead filled with solid planes of orange-red and green. This representation of the Mosaic Law is doubly marginalized within the image: the Tablets sit upon an altar stripped of its cloth, an indication of its deconsecrated state, and unlike the Eucharist, which receives God’s benediction, the Tablets of the Law are ignored by all eyes save our own.19 The Houghton Bible historiale frontispiece describes a space of visual sanctity. Dominated by the presence of the divine in the midst of a visualized Gospel harmony, this image is specified as a locus inhabited by multiple incarnations of God’s Word in the world. Within the logic of this Christian space there is 94 Aden Kumler Fig. 2. Frontispiece. Bible historiale; BL, Harley 4381, fol. 3r. (Photo: ©The British Library. All Rights Reserved.) Faire translater, faire historier 95 Fig. 3. Frontispiece. Bible historiale; St. Petersburg, National Library of Russia, MS Fr.F.v.I, 1/1–2, vol. 1, fol. 1r. (Photo: By permission of the National Library of Russia.) 96 Aden Kumler Fig. 4. Frontispiece (detail). Bible historiale; Cambridge, Houghton Library, Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, MS Typ 555, vol. 1, fol. 1r. (Photo: By permission of the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library.) already established a hierarchy of presence and sacrality: the Old Law, as given to the Jews, is visually constructed as an outmoded first term rendered less sacred by the evidence of the New Testament and the ongoing sacramental authority of the Church. The iconographic type of God in Majesty flanked by the Tablets of the Law and the Eucharist possesses a distinct genealogy that further enriches its resonance in the Houghton Bible historiale. As Jeffrey Hamburger has discussed, this type of Majestas first appears to have flourished in thirteenth-century French Missals, where it served as an illustration to the Canon of the Mass.20 Arras, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 38 (58), a Missal made ca. 1250 for the Augustinian Canons of Mont-Saint-Eloi, is the earliest known example of this iconography in a manuscript context (Fig. 5).21 Other known examples of this type of Majestas suggest that the iconography may have enjoyed particular favor among Parisian artists and patrons, beginning with the circle of Louis IX (1214–70) and extending into the reign of Charles V.22 The opulent inclusion of this Majestas variant on the lower Faire translater, faire historier 97 Fig. 5. Crucifixion and Majestas. Missal made for the Canons of Mont-Saint-Eloi; Arras, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 38 (58), fols. 105v–106r. (Photo: Médiathèque d’Arras.) cover of the third Sainte-Chapelle Evangeliary would certainly have distinguished it as a regal motif, authorized by Louis IX’s patronage (Fig. 6).23 As Anne Hedeman and others have explored, Charles V deliberately set about appropriating the images of his revered forebears, most notably Charlemagne and Louis IX, as exemplars for his own royal image and as authorizing types of righteous dynastic rule.24 The Majestas variant incorporated into the Houghton Bible historiale’s frontispiece is but one instance of Charles V’s appropriation of a signifier associated with Louis IX’s sainted authority.25 Through the inclusion of this particular type of Majestas, the Houghton manuscript’s frontispiece evokes the iconographic repertoire of Louis IX’s artistic undertakings and, simultaneously, the Canon pages of contemporary Missals. This doubled evocation of sainted royal ancestor and central Christian rite inflects the rhetoric of sacral presence and superseded Law that informs the miniature as whole. The prefatory statement articulated in the first folio of the Houghton Bible historiale is not, however, confined to the folio’s miniature. In a manuscript containing a vernacular translation of much of the Christian Bible, an image that asserts the supplanting of one form of God’s Word by another will, inevitably, have much to say about the status of the vernacular text that it prefaces. The French text that 98 Aden Kumler Fig. 6. Majestas. 3rd Sainte-Chapelle Evangeliary; BnF, lat. 17326, lower cover. (Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.) Faire translater, faire historier 99 adjoins the bottom edge of the Houghton manuscript’s frontispiece introduces a new term in this calculus of supersession. What are the implications of the progression effected here from God’s Word given in the Mosaic Tablets to the Christian sacramental presentation of the Word as Eucharist? Likewise, what is signified in the continuation of this trajectory, beyond the miniature’s frame, to the French text of both the Old and New Testaments that follows? Pursuit of these questions takes us from the Houghton Bible historiale’s frontispiece to the folios that follow it. Looking for the Tablets of the Law As we have noted in a brief examination of the manuscript’s frontispiece, the Tablets of the Law given to Moses are presented as an anterior and surpassed term within a visual trajectory that begins with God in Majesty and terminates in the sacral presence of the Eucharist upon its consecrated altar. Pursuing this trajectory, let us now turn to other images addressing the transmission of the Mosaic Law in order to further evaluate the resonance of the Tablets’ presence in the Houghton manuscript’s frontispiece. The manuscript’s narrative account of the creation and transmission of the Tablets of the Law begins on Mount Horeb in Moses’ encounter with God in the burning bush.26 Receiving the command to liberate Israel from its servitude in Egypt, Moses becomes the leader of his people. As it glosses the Mount Horeb episode, the text of the Bible historiale also suggests that we might find a portent of the transmission of the Law in this encounter with the burning bush: “The Master of the Histories says truly that he [Moses] came to the Mountain of Sinai which in one of its parts is called Horeb.”27 The Bible historiale’s vernacular geography lesson identifies Mount Horeb as a component of Mount Sinai, the place where Moses will subsequently receive the Ten Commandments (Fig. 7). In the miniature that introduces the relevant biblical passage a horned Moses is depicted kneeling on a verdant hillside. Two small trees stand before him, but his eyes are directed towards his divine interlocutor, a floating disembodied head, emitting red, burning rays. The head of God, which speaks to Moses, is that of Christ: young, beardless, and bearing a cruciform halo.28 Neither the depiction of God, nor the two slight trees visually identify the scene. The pictorial feature that marks our place in the narrative is the minutely detailed rendering of Moses’ boots, left behind in obedience to God’s command: “Approach not, unless you remove your shoes from your feet, for the place where you are is holy ground.”29 Matching text to image, the viewer recognizes what Moses does not yet know, that he kneels in the very place where, in the future, God’s Word will move from an oral to a written register. The absence of any representation of the burning bush serves 100 Aden Kumler Fig. 7. Moses on Mount Horeb. Bible historiale; Cambridge, Houghton Library, Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, MS Typ 555, vol. 1, fol. 53r B. (Photo: By permission of the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library.) Fig. 8. Moses and Aaron before Pharaoh. Bible historiale; Cambridge, Houghton Library, Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, MS Typ 555, vol. 1, fol. 55v B. (Photo: By permission of the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library.) Faire translater, faire historier 101 to reinforce the oral quality of this interaction: Moses kneels and raises his hands in a gesture of prayer before a God who is only a talking head.30 Eschewing the standard iconographic attribute of this scene—the burning bush—the miniature constructs this episode as one of oral and aural interaction between God and a divinely elected leader. The image’s denial of the standard iconographic attribute of this episode asks the viewer to identify the scene by means of a distanced and complete knowledge of the whole narrative, facilitated by the vernacular commentary text that follows. Emphasizing the oral and dialogic quality of Moses’ encounter with God, the image simultaneously solicits the reader-viewer’s knowledge of the Old Testament text found in the Bible historiale’s vernacular folios. Moses’ Verge and His Inadequate Tongue It is not a little ironic that this miniature should construct Moses as an exemplary conversationalist with the Divine, for it is on Mount Horeb that Moses protests the inadequacy of his own linguistic abilities. When directed to exhort the Israelites and to communicate what he has heard Moses protests: “Lord I hardly speak well at all for I have a hindered tongue.”31 When he is commanded to confront Pharaoh Moses again repeats this self-criticism, telling God, “I speak badly.”32 In both cases the Divinity responds by promising Moses that he will have Aaron as his mouthpiece and that he will convince his audience by working miracles with his verge or rod. Like the burning bush, Moses’ rod is not represented in the Mount Horeb miniature. The rod is, however, depicted in a subsequent miniature; the specific form it is given reveals how the polemical framework of the Houghton manuscript’s visual program elides Moses’ oratorical insecurity, stressing instead his status as an exemplar of proper and powerful language. We first encounter Moses’ verge in the miniature that introduces chapter eleven of the Bible historiale’s book of Exodus (Fig. 8).33 Both text and miniature are introduced by the rubric: “How the rods were changed into serpents according to the Bible.”34 Despite the rubric’s claim, the miniature is not strictly selonc, consistent with, the biblical account. The text describes Aaron as Moses’ mouth,35 and in the text it is Aaron whose transformed rod devours the enchanters’ serpent-staffs.36 In the manuscript’s miniature, however, Aaron’s importance is undermined; he raises his hand in a gesture of address, but his is clearly a secondary role. Relying on the same technique of iconographic idiosyncrasy that informed the Mount Horeb miniature, the image of Moses and Aaron before Pharaoh departs from the text in a signifying detail: the specific form of the rods held by Moses and Aaron. In their confrontation with Pharaoh, Moses and Aaron do not hold the 102 Aden Kumler verges that are represented in the subsequent images of Moses parting the Red Sea and striking water from the rock (Figs. 9 and 10). In these scenes, each rod is given the form of a long, smooth, and slender white stick. In the miniature of Moses and Aaron before Pharaoh the illuminator has been quite careful to depict a different type of rod and we must look outside the pages of the manuscript to understand its significance. The right doorway of the west façade of Chartres Cathedral provides us with an antecedent for the appearance of Moses’ verge (Fig. 11). Part of an archivolt program of the seven liberal arts, the figure of Grammar wields a disciplining switch that closely resembles the anomalous verges brandished by Moses and Aaron before Pharaoh. Like many of the royal personages depicted in the pages of the Houghton Bible historiale, Pharaoh bears all the marks of a French king.37 The Egyptian king wears a gold crown surmounted with fleurs-de-lis and holds a scepter that likewise terminates in a fleur-de-lis.38 The illuminator’s rendering of Pharaoh’s throne further assimilates his figure to that of a French king. Pharaoh’s throne, depicted as a faldstool whose terminals are formed in the shape of lion’s heads, evokes the so-called Throne of Dagobert, housed in the fourteenth century at the Royal Abbey of Saint-Denis.39 Employed in coronation rites by Capetian kings and their Valois successors,40 this seat features repeatedly in representations of Charles V in manuscripts commissioned for or by the King.41 Although it would be misguided to see the figure of Pharaoh as a portrait of Charles V, we may, nonetheless, note that the miniature establishes the regal status of the Egyptian king by means of the insignia of Capetian and Valois monarchial authority.42 Invested with the attributes of a Valois king, the figure of Pharaoh may have provided Charles V with a salutary reminder of the dangers of royal misspeech.43 The miniature depicting Aaron and Moses before Pharaoh departs from both textual and iconographic precedent in several respects. The significance of these alterations becomes clearer if we consider this miniature in connection with the representation of Moses on Mount Horeb (Fig. 7). From one image to the next we have moved from a construction of Moses as a leader distinguished by divine election and dialogue with the Deity to a further portrayal of Moses possessed of Grammar’s verge with which he chastises a French Pharaoh, much as a personification of Grammar might chastise an unruly pupil. Confronted with his disciplining switch, the magicians’ serpents fall before Moses like so many writhing banderoles of profane speech. Making a scriptural miracle story into an exemplification of oratorical authority, the miniature constructs the contest between Moses and Pharaoh as a linguistic battle in which Moses’ divinely sanctioned speech emerges victorious. This visual glossing of Moses’ authority in terms of linguistic rectitude and reproach bears directly on the Faire translater, faire historier 103 Fig. 9. Moses parts the Red Sea. Bible historiale; Cambridge, Houghton Library, Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, MS Typ 555, vol. 1, fol. 61r A. (Photo: By permission of the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library.) Fig. 10. Moses strikes water from the rock. Bible historiale; Cambridge, Houghton Library, Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, MS Typ 555, vol. 1, fol. 98v A. (Photo: By permission of the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library.) 104 Aden Kumler Fig. 11. Grammatica. Archivolt figure, right doorway, west portal, Chartres Cathedral. (Photo: Author.) Faire translater, faire historier 105 manuscript’s treatment of the evolving incarnation of the Divine Word and Law in the world. The Blank Book of the Law In a miniature prefacing the section of Exodus devoted to the transmission of the Law on Mount Sinai, the Houghton Bible historiale’s illuminators did not attempt a representation of the unseen and thunderous Divinity of the text (Fig. 12). Instead the viewer is presented with God in the burning bush, the apparition conspicuously omitted from the Mount Horeb miniature. On the far left of the image a group of Israelites kneel in awe. Two of the Israelites shield their eyes with their hands, obscuring their vision of God’s head in the bush and of Moses who kneels before them. Placed at the center of the miniature, the figure of Moses demands our attention. Gazing toward God’s head, Moses displays the divine Law he has received. The Law does not, however, assume the form of the round-topped Tablets that we last encountered in the manuscript’s frontispiece image: the object in Moses’ hands is a book. The text tells us that “la loy et li .x. commandemens furent donné par parole,” a vernacular turn of phrase that could imply either an oral or a written transmission.44 The Mount Sinai miniature, however, asserts that God’s parole is transmitted to the Israelites not by speech alone, nor on tablets, the iconographically standard representation of the Law; the Law that Moses receives on Mount Sinai is instead bound in a codex.45 This miniature stands as the sole representation of the transmission, fracture and re-inscription of the Law described in Exodus.46 Unlike the painted Israelites, who shield their eyes from the sight of Moses and the Law, our vision of the manuscript’s representation of the Mosaic Law is unimpeded. Gazing at the book in Moses’ hands we cannot fail to recognize that its pages are blank. Deuteronomy, the transcript of Moses’ recital of the divine dicta he received on Mount Sinai, would seem a likely place for a postponed depiction of the Tablets of the Law. Indeed, in at least one other Bible historiale the book of Deuteronomy is graced with a scene of Moses reading to the Israelites from the Tablets (Fig. 13).47 The Houghton manuscript, by contrast, persists in its refusal to depict the Old Law as either tablet or legible text. In the miniature prefacing Deuteronomy, Moses is a pedagogue who admonishes the audience kneeling before him (Fig. 14).48 No longer is Moses the selfdeprecating speaker of Mount Horeb; he is now depicted as a voice of authority communicating God’s Law to his people through oral performance. The absence of the Tablets of the Law from this scene once again inscribes the tradition of the Old Law and Moses’ authority in an oral register. Considered together, the blank 106 Aden Kumler Fig. 12. Moses displays the blank book of the Law. Bible historiale; Cambridge, Houghton Library, Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, MS Typ 555, vol. 1, fol. 65r B. (Photo: By permission of the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library.) Fig. 13. Moses with the Tablets of the Law (Deuteronomy). Bible historiale; BL, Harley 4381, fol. 86v. (Photo: © The British Library. All Rights Reserved.) Faire translater, faire historier 107 Fig. 14. Moses in the pulpit (Deuteronomy). Bible historiale; Cambridge, Houghton Library, Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, MS Typ 555, vol. 1, fol. 107v B. (Photo: By permission of the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library.) Fig. 15. Baruch addresses the Israelites. Bible historiale; Cambridge, Houghton Library, Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, MS Typ 555, vol. 2, fol. 87v B. (Photo: By permission of the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library.) 108 Aden Kumler pages of the Law in the Mount Sinai miniature and the absence of any text in the miniature prefacing the Deutoronomic recapitulation of that Law deny the biblical Israelites painted in these images any claim to a legible text. And yet, as Moses addresses the Israelites from a pulpit, he declaims the very text, translated into Middle French, which the manuscript’s Christian reader-viewer encounters written in the vernacular folios that follow. The Houghton Bible historiale’s miniatures and vernacular text work together to effect a signifying substitution: the lingua sacra of Hebrew is rendered a visual and oral, rather than a legible, attribute of Old Testament authority; simultaneously, the sapiential content of divine Law and Scripture, is found, translated and transcribed, in the manuscript’s legible columns of vernacular text. Scribbled Prophecy and Illegible Wisdom In a composition echoing that of the Deuteronomy miniature, Baruch reads his prophecy to a distinguished audience (Fig. 15). Like the depiction of the book of the Law in the Mount Sinai image, Baruch’s volume is oriented so that it is fully accessible to the viewer. Any attempt to read prophetic wisdom from its pages is thwarted, however, for Baruch’s book contains only six jagged lines of scribble. The Baruch miniature marks a shift in the manuscript’s representation of Hebrew wisdom. In the Mount Sinai and Deuteronomy miniatures, painted by the Master of the Coronation of Charles VI (perhaps with assistance from other artists), divinely mandated Old Testament texts are represented either as blank pages or immaterial speech. The miniatures that preface the Prophetic books (Figs. 15–18) are the work of the Master of the Livre du Sacre de Charles V, who employs analphabetic marks to visualize the prophets’ divinely-inspired texts. Although these two illuminators employ different visual means to represent Hebrew wisdom, their miniatures consistently represent Old Testament text as unreadable.49 In the Baruch miniature, the illuminator’s illegible representation of prophetic text is authorized by the legible Middle French text that follows the miniature. Here, in columns of vernacular text, we read the voices of the Israelites crying: “. . . and we strayed so that we did not hear the voice of Our Lord”;50 and further: “Our Lord is just in all the things that He commanded us. And we have not heeded his voice to walk in the commandments which he revealed to us . . . we have sinned and we have done wickedly.”51 The Bible historiale’s Middle French text indicates that the Israelites have failed to adhere to the Covenant and divine Law transmitted to them through Moses. The miniature introducing Baruch’s text renders this failure visible in the illegible contents of the prophet’s book. The fulfillment of Baruch’s exhortation to “Receive my words [or speech] if you would know wisdom” is denied to the fictive Faire translater, faire historier 109 Israelites who inhabit the miniature’s painted landscape.52 It is instead the French, Christian readers of this royal manuscript who have access to Baruch’s prophetic sapience translated into the legible vernacular text that follows the image. The example of Baruch’s book is not an anomaly in the Houghton Bible historiale. As the prophet Sophonias contemplates the face of God, he also displays a book inscribed with the jagged lines of the unintelligible made visible (Fig. 16).53 And even Ezekiel, contemplating the tetramorph, a portent of the Christian future, is not exempted from the manuscript’s insistent refusal to lend Hebrew text even the pretense of legibility. The visionary scroll that Ezekiel holds, inscribed with “. . . lamentations, anger and grief . . .,” appears to our eyes as nothing more than an unfurling series of scratch marks (Fig. 17).54 The relegation of Old Testament Hebrew prophetic text to the seen rather than the read culminates in the miniature that introduces the book of Malachi (Fig. 18).55 At the center of the miniature Malachi sits between two curtains drawn back behind the limits of the miniature’s quatrefoil frame. The combined elements of altarlike seat and parted curtains visually evoke the sanctum sanctorum of the Temple, suggesting that Malachi and the tablets in his hands occupy the space usually associated with the Ark of the Covenant. In this image the round-topped tablets, so conspicuously omitted in the miniatures for Exodus and Deuteronomy, finally reappear, with one signifying difference. The black fields that fill Malachi’s tablets do not conceal from our eyes the God-given text of the Ten Commandments, for these round-topped tablets are not those written by Moses and housed in the Ark of the Covenant. Malachi’s tablets are a collection of at least six leaves. In the context of the Houghton Bible historiale’s visual program, this visual sleight-of-hand appropriates the form of the Mosaic Law and demotes it to the status of a temporary notebook, appropriate for ephemeral writings rather than the eternal precepts of God’s covenant with the Israelites. Considered together, as they would have been by the Houghton manuscript’s anticipated reader-viewer, these miniatures define a narrative that begins with Moses’ divine election and God’s authorization of his speech and terminates in prophetic texts rendered illegible to their Israelite audiences. The sustained absence of the Mosaic Tablets from the pictured world of the Israelites emerges as a polemical commentary if we consider that the Tablets of the Law may be found only in the explicitly Christian space of the manuscript’s frontispiece. Consistently refusing legibility in their depiction of Old Testament text, the Houghton Bible historiale’s miniatures suggest that the Israelites, as result of their transgressions, have forfeited the divine authorization conferred by God upon Moses. Within the painted polemic of the Houghton Bible historiale’s visual program the Israelites are denied even the letter of their law. 110 Aden Kumler Fig. 16: Sophonias and his book. Bible historiale; Cambridge, Houghton Library, Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, MS Typ 555, vol. 2, fol. 129v A. (Photo: By permission of the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library.) Fig. 17. Ezekiel’s vision of the tetramorph. Bible historiale; Cambridge, Houghton Library, Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, MS Typ 555, vol. 2, fol. 90v B. (Photo: By permission of the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library.) Faire translater, faire historier 111 Fig. 18. Malachi’s many tablets. Bible historiale; Cambridge, Houghton Library, Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, MS Typ 555, vol. 2, fol. 134v A. (Photo: By permission of the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library.) Fig. 19. ‘Iochannes.’ Bible historiale; Cambridge, Houghton Library, Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, MS Typ 555, vol. 2, fol. 206v A. (Photo: By permission of the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library.) 112 Aden Kumler Parisian Polemic and the Persecution of the Jews The visual argument of the Houghton Bible historiale’s miniatures is but one constitutive link in a chain of theological polemic that was consolidated and intensified in Paris under the aegis of Louis IX, Charles V’s royal role model. In 1239 Pope Gregory IX (ca. 1170–1241) issued Apostolic letters urging the archbishops and reigning monarchs of England, Aragon, Navarre, Castile, Leon, Portugal, and France to confiscate the books of the Jews living under their jurisdiction and to hand these volumes over to the Dominicans and Franciscans.56 Louis IX was the only party to comply with these instructions, and on the first Saturday of Lent in the following year (March 3, 1240), in accordance with the Pope’s decree, the Jews of Paris were robbed of their books. In June of the same year the Talmud was publicly tried at Paris in the presence of the Queen Mother Blanche of Castile (1188–1252), as well as ecclesiastical and university dignitaries.57 Amongst the various charges advanced against the Talmud was the claim that thirteenth-century Jews no longer maintained the religion of their biblical predecessors. As Gregory IX wrote: . . . not content with the Old Law which God gave in writing through Moses, and even ignoring it completely, [the Jews] affirm that God gave them another Law which is called the Talmud. . . . They lie to the effect that it was handed down to Moses orally and implanted in their minds, and was preserved unwritten for a long time until there arrived those . . . who reduced it to writing so that it not be forgotten from people’s minds. 58 The accusation that contemporary Jews had not only transgressed, but had even supplanted Mosaic Law with a new, originally oral, law of human invention also informed the invective of Eudes of Châteauroux, chancellor of the University of Paris (1238–44) and a future papal legate and cardinal-bishop, who participated in the trial of 1240 and in later persecutions of the Talmud.59 Writing to Innocent IV (ca. 1195–1254), Gregory IX’s successor, Eudes claimed that an examination of the Jews’ confiscated books revealed that: . . . a veil has been placed over the heart of these people to such an extent that [their books] turn the Jews away not only from a spiritual understanding [of the Law] but even from a literal understanding [of it] . . .60 As Jeremy Cohen, Hyam Maccoby, Judah Rosenthal, Irven Resnick, and others have noted, this claim—that the Jews had abandoned the Mosaic Law and the religious observances of Old Testament Judaism—amounted to an invalidation of the Augustinian precept that the Jews must be tolerated within Christendom as living letters of the law.61 Faire translater, faire historier 113 Jeremy Cohen has thoughtfully delineated the evolution and complications of Augustine’s conception of the Jew and the Jew’s place in the world.62 Without disregarding the complexities of Augustine’s thought on this question we may yet identify one feature of his teaching that had a lasting influence on medieval Christian conceptions of the Jew. Augustine argued that the Jews, in their scattered state, served everywhere as living witnesses to the authenticity of the Old Testament scriptures that Christians understood as prophetic validations of the New Testament. Understanding the words of Psalm 59:12 (“Slay them not, lest at any time they forget your law”) as a prophetic injunction, Augustine asserted that Christians should tolerate a continued Jewish presence in the world so long as the Jews fulfilled their role as witnesses to the Old Law. In this vein Augustine wrote concerning the Jews: Therefore they have not been killed in this sense, namely, that they have not forgotten those things which used to be read and heard among them. For if they were to forget the holy scriptures entirely (even though they do not now understand them), they would be undone in the Jewish rite itself, because, if they would know nothing of the law and the prophets, the Jews could be of no benefit.63 The charges laid against the Talmud at the Parisian trial of 1240 struck directly at the core of this Augustinian precept. In short, the trial of the Talmud in 1240, and subsequent condemnations of the Talmud and Rabbinic Judaism, advanced a polemical analysis wherein thirteenth-century Jews were no longer the guardians of a literal understanding and observance of Mosaic Law. Thirteenth-century condemnations of the Talmud effectively severed contemporary Judaism from its biblical antecedents in the minds of thirteenth-century Christians. Constructed as willful abandoners of their own religious law, and as distorters and deniers of the Old Testament prophetic tradition, the Jews of France no longer fulfilled the role of scriptural witness allotted to them by Christian theologians and exegetes.64 Having denied Judaei moderni any claim to the faith of the biblical forbears, and thus divesting them of their status as scriptural witnesses, Parisian officials committed a polemically consistent act of devastating ‘biblioclasm’ on June 6, 1242, when they burned twenty-four cartloads of books confiscated from the Jews of Paris.65 The trial of the Talmud in 1240, prosecuted by officials from the University of Paris and the king’s own chaplain, initiated a Parisian reconceptualization of the Jew undertaken with Louis IX’s approval. A little more than one hundred years later his successor, and emulator, Charles V possessed a vernacular Bible wherein the Hebrew texts of Old Testament Law and wisdom are rendered blank, illegible, 114 Aden Kumler and otherwise unintelligible. In Louis IX’s Paris the Jews had been denied even a literal understanding of Scripture, in Charles V’s Bible historiale they remain, in their painted forms, incapable of receiving the sapience proclaimed by Moses and the Prophets. Where then in his Bible historiale could Charles V find visible wisdom? Significantly, the legible Word of God appears next in the painted hands of Christian writers. The Verbum Dei in the Hands of the Evangelists Rather than minutely transcribing text, many illuminators employed visual signs for writing in their miniatures. This practice of substituting a highly approximate visualization of writing for actual letterforms may be found in a wide range of images from a diversity of contexts. It would be entirely possible that the illuminators of the Houghton Bible historiale, in their treatment of the writings of the Hebrew prophets, were employing an artistic expedient rather than asserting some kind of sustained commentary on the status of Hebrew text, were it not for the miniatures that preface the Gospels (Figs. 19–22). In these miniatures each Evangelist reprises his role in the manuscript’s frontispiece image (Fig. 4). These paradigmatic Christian authors sit on altarlike benches, hard at work on the Gospels, which are metonymically identified by microtexts inscribed on each of the Evangelists’ writing supports. Consisting simply of the Latinate form of the Evangelist’s name, the texts depicted within these miniatures are hardly extensive, but they are legible. In the minute letters inscribed on two scrolls we may discern the names Iochannes66 and Lucas (Figs. 19 and 20).67 The scroll in the first Evangelist portrait bears a misspelling of the Latin Mattheus (Fig. 21).68 Exceptionally, Mark’s scroll remains blank (Fig. 22).69 Like the orthography of the microtexts painted in the miniatures for John and Matthew, Mark’s blank writing support reminds us that it was the illuminator, almost certainly a speaker and writer of vernacular language who inscribed the legible, if imperfect Latin text in these miniatures.70 The inscription of each Evangelist’s name serves two purposes. First, it reinforces the Evangelist symbol’s visual identification of each Gospel writer. Second, making legibility an attribute of inspired Christian writers, it extends the visual program’s polemical distinction between the seen and the read, the oral and the textual. The very legibility of the terse texts written by these exceptional Christian scribes suggests a signifying purpose in the sustained illegibility of the Hebrew texts represented in the manuscript’s miniatures. Faire translater, faire historier 115 Fig. 20. Lucas. Bible historiale; Cambridge, Houghton Library, Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, MS Typ 555, vol. 2, fol. 188v B. (Photo: By permission of the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library.) Fig. 21. ‘Mateheus.’ Bible historiale; Cambridge, Houghton Library, Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, MS Typ 555, vol. 2, fol. 161r A. (Photo: By permission of the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library.) 116 Aden Kumler Fig. 22. Mark. Bible historiale; Cambridge, Houghton Library, Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, MS Typ 555, vol. 2, fol. 177v B. (Photo: By permission of the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library.) Fig. 23. The seventh day of creation. Bible historiale; Cambridge, Houghton Library, Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, MS Typ 555, vol. 1, fol. 7r B. (Photo: By permission of the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library.) Faire translater, faire historier 117 From God’s Mouth to Charles’s Page Considered in its manuscript context, the Houghton Bible historiale’s frontispiece makes a startling first statement in the manuscript’s sustained visual commentary on the transmission of Divine presence and precept in the world (Fig. 4). The import of the polemical juxtaposition of the Tablets of the Mosaic Law and the Eucharistic sacrifice of the Christian church in the prefatory image acquires greater significance in light of the manuscript’s sustained resistance to the representation of authoritative Hebrew text. In the opening folio of the manuscript we find not three, but four incarnations of the Divine. The point of origin for the transmission of divine teaching is located at the center of the miniature in the figure of Christ-God in Majesty. That this representation of the Deity must be understood as a visualization of Christ as divine logos is suggested by its further iteration in the miniature prefacing the Genesis account of the seventh day of creation (Fig. 23).71 Seated frontally on an altarlike bench, the Divinity makes the sign of benediction and holds an orb of his dominion in his left hand, echoing the figure of God in Majesty in the frontispiece. In the Genesis miniature the orb of dominion is inscribed with an abbreviated form of Christ’s name, a nominum sacrum whose contracted form marks it as a sign of power: legible, yet transcending human language.72 In both miniatures God-the-Creator assumes Christ’s form. Taken together, these two images assert Christ’s preincarnational agency in the Divinity’s creative act. As visualized logos Christ is both the Creator-Deity and God’s creating Word. This Christian conception of the Divinity, visualized in the Houghton manuscript’s images, ascribes to God-Christ the creation of the visible world through the divine Word that is, ultimately, his very being.73 The frontispiece miniature thus ‘begins before the beginning,’ presenting us with the origins of all sacred scripture, and all divinely authorized language, in the ur-word, Christ himself. The second visualization of God’s Word in the world takes the form of the Mosaic Tablets. Relegated to one edge of the miniature and filled with flat planes of pigment, this symbolic matrix of the Divine’s presence in the Hebrew language is presented as an outmoded artifact to be seen, rather than read and revered. Absent from the painted world of the Israelites, the Tablets of the Law are now confined within the architecture of Christian typology, a prized witness to the pre-eminence of Christian truth. Recalling the efflorescence of this Majestas variant in Louis IX’s Paris, in the Houghton Bible historiale’s frontispiece miniature can we not discern a visible claim for a Christian usurpation of the office of scriptural witness? The presence of the Tablets of the Law in the manuscript’s prefatory image implies both a Jewish abandoning of Divine Law and a Christian appropriation of the relics of biblical Judaism. 118 Aden Kumler A triumphant term in this calculus of supersession, the Christian altar visibly attests to the incarnational authority vested in the rites of God’s new Covenant. Placed to receive the benediction of God’s right hand, the Eucharistic wafer and chalice transcend the categories of the legible and the seen to rejoin the figure of God in the register of transcendent esse. Within the miniature’s frame the sacramental incarnation of God’s Word in two species emerges as a victorious term in the opposition between the letter and the spirit of Divine Law, a triumph witnessed by the inspired Latin writings of the four Evangelists. These legible Latin texts, echoed in the miniatures that introduce the Gospels, are clearly distinguished from the illegible or blank texts belonging to the manuscript’s painted Israelites. As the frontispiece makes clear, the Evangelists know how to handle the Word of God. The Houghton Bible historiale’s first image collaborates with the miniatures that follow it to outline a history of righteous speech, transgressive inattention, and the triumphant reincarnation of God’s Word in new forms and languages. The argument articulated by the frontispiece image does not, however, rest in the triumph of Evangelical Latinity, nor does it conclude in the iconographic polemic of Capetian Paris. The extravagant golden architecture that surmounts the miniature frames its visible polemic in the visual idiom of fourteenth-century France. The decorative vocabulary of the page, incorporating blue fleurs-de-lis and foliate tendrils sprouting leaves of red, gold, and blue, stamps its parchment with the colors of the Valois king (Fig. 1).74 Enclosing both miniature and vernacular text, these framing devices signify the manuscript’s royal affiliation, thus implying that the translatio of divine presence extends to the vernacular Bible that Charles V marked as his own.75 Translatio Linguae and the Translatio Studii The argument articulated by the Houghton manuscript’s frontispiece image is not an exclusively theological polemic: the image’s rhetoric is echoed in contemporary historical linguistics. As early as the twelfth century, French clerics had formulated a theory of the evolution of the medieval vernaculars that privileged the language of France.76 Tracing a genealogy of knowledge, culture, and political authority, the topos of the translatio studii formulated in preceding centuries enjoyed considerable success in fourteenth-century France.77 The dominant model of the translatio studii argued for a three-part migration of the studium: originally resident in Athens, the intellectual center of gravity had subsequently shifted to Rome and from there to Paris and its University.78 Variously Charlemagne, Alcuin, and St. Denis were credited with the foundation of the University of Paris, and these figures, central to an emergent national identity, were often credited with the final transposition of the studium. As Vincent of Beauvais Faire translater, faire historier 119 stated: “. . . Alcuin . . . outstanding in knowledge and life, as he transferred from Rome to Paris the study of wisdom, which had formerly been transferred there [e.g., to Rome] from Greece by the Romans.”79 A competing formulation of the translatio studii placed greater emphasis on the historical relationships between languages. Scrutinizing elements of grammatical similarity and divergence between languages, medieval grammarians developed linguistic genealogies that implicitly outlined a stemma of cultural and sapiential heritage.80 Within this scheme Hebrew occupied the place of a primary language, its words derived directly from God; Greek in turn was derived from Hebrew, and Latin from Greek. Serge Lusignan has summarized the import of this conceptual model: “The translatio that bound Latin to Greek and to Hebrew meant that these three languages did not appear distinct, but rather as the manifestation, through time, of that same reality that is the word of God.”81 Despite their claims for France and, more particularly, for Paris as the studium’s new center, many advocates of the translatio studii theme stopped short of claiming a real equality between the French language and the linguae sacrae of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Given this climate of scholarly caution, it is significant that one of the individuals credited with establishing the French vernacular as a language of sapience equal to its ancient predecessors was the philosopher Nicole Oresme, one of Charles V’s most favored translators.82 Charged by the king with the translation of the Nicomachean Ethics, the Politics, and the pseudo-Aristotelian Economics, Oresme was no stranger to the limitations of the French lexicon. Rather than lamenting the limits of his native language, however, Nicole Oresme took the particular challenge of translation as an opportunity to redefine the capacity and authority of the vernacular.83 Oresme elaborated this language-based philosophie de la culture in the prefaces to his translations and in other works addressed or accessible to the King, giving us every reason to believe that Charles V was acutely aware of, and even self-consciously engaged in this advocacy of the French vernacular as a language of sapience. Spiritual Israelites and le Roi très chrètien To these linguistic and cultural-historical models that collaborated in the fourteenth century to position the French kingdom and language as the modern locus et lingua studii, a third strain of French ideological self-fashioning should be added. Already in the thirteenth century the French kings enjoyed the honorific of Rex christianissimus or Roi très chrètien.84 During the reign of Philip IV (1285–1314) royal propaganda had exploited a notion of the French king’s exceptional Christianity to assert the independence of the monarchy’s power in relation to both ecclesiastical and imperial authority.85 Propagandistic discourses 120 Aden Kumler emphasized France’s unfaltering Christianity since the time of its conversion.86 The holy ampoule, the oriflamme, the numerous relics possessed by the kingdom, the thaumaturgic power of the king’s touch, and the miraculous origin of the fleurde-lis were among the evidence marshaled to affirm the exceptional sanctity of the French king and his kingdom.87 At the start of the fourteenth century this rhetoric of exceptionality became increasingly and insistently couched in the terms of Biblical precedent. The success of such ideological self-fashioning is attested as early as 1302 when the Dominican friar Guillaume de Sauqueville, taking the praise of the French king for the theme of several sermons, could refer to the French people as the people of God.88 Repeating many of the claims championed by royal apologists in France, Clement V’s bull Rex gloriae (1311) provides a succinct summary of this ideological discourse: “The king of Glory formed different kingdoms within the circuit of this world and established governments for diverse peoples according to differences of language and race. Among those, like the people of Israel . . ., the kingdom of France, as a peculiar people chosen by the Lord to carry out the orders of Heaven, is distinguished by marks of special honor and grace. . . .”89 Although many of the elements enlisted in this hyperbolic praise of the French king and his kingdom may be found in texts predating the reign of the Philip IV, it is during Philip’s reign that they acquired a new rhetorical coherency and juridical force.90 As Colette Beaune explains: This sanctification [of the kingdom of France and its monarchs] found its most forceful expression in the equation of France with the Kingdom of Israel. For this, as we have seen, Guillaume de Sauqueville and his contemporaries around 1300 set a precedent when they drew parallels between the kings of France and Israel, between the people of France and the Hebrew nation: the royal throne was like David’s, the king himself the figure of Moses.91 Accounts of the miraculous origins of the royal insignia, an amnesiac assertion that France had always been a Christian kingdom free from heresy, and the exceptional strength of French Catholicism in the here and now were harnessed to cast the French people in the role of ‘new Israelites.’ The rhetoric is extreme: France has become a new Holy Land; the French are a new chosen people; like Moses and David, their king is favored beyond all others in the eyes of God. In short, French propaganda announced the creation of a New Covenant, one that established the French king and his people as a chosen nation of spiritual Israelites. The refusal to acknowledge Judaei moderni as authentically Jewish and the typing of Rabbinic Faire translater, faire historier 121 Judaism as heretical, first explicitly articulated at Paris in the second half of the thirteenth century, undoubtedly conspired to strengthen French monarchial claims to the divine favor enjoyed by Biblical kings and constructions of the French people as a new, unsullied, Israel. This was the ideological inheritance of Charles V. Whereas Philip IV, embroiled in a struggle for independence from Rome and the Empire, had exploited this rhetoric primarily to argue for a sovereignty mandated by God and subject to no other authority, Charles V, it seems, pursued other strains within this ideological complex.92 Aided by such talented translators as Jacques Bauchant, Robert de Godefroi, Pelerin de Prusse, Evrart de Conty, Jean Daudin, Denis Foulechat, Jean Corbechon, Jean Golein, Raoul de Presles and, above all, Nicole Oresme, Charles V initiated an unprecedented program of translations from Latin to the vernacular.93 Recalling Clement V’s bull Rex gloriae, it is possible to see Charles V’s translations as a project undertaken by a chosen king for a chosen people in the language chosen for them by God. Although a vernacular translation of the Bible had already been undertaken by his father Jean le Bon,94 Charles V’s documented interest in translations of Holy Writ suggests that le Roi sage, like Moses before him, was determined to provide his people, if only that elite who enjoyed access to the royal library, with Scripture in their native language. In her Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V, Christine de Pisan wrote of the Valois king’s translation project: . . . but although he understood Latin well, and never required that [Latin texts] be explained to him, he was of such great foresight that out of the great love he had for his successors, he wished to provide for them, in the future, teachings and knowledge that lead to all the virtues; thus, for this reason, he had respected masters, proficient in all the sciences and arts, translate all the most important books from Latin into French; for example, the Bible in three manners, that is, the text, and the text and the gloss together, and, in another manner, [the Bible] allegorically interpreted. . . .95 In Christine’s view, the Valois king’s translation project was intended to provide an essential good for his successors and, by implication, for the French people as a whole.96 Faire translater, faire historier Within the conceptual framework of a spiritually charged and divinely-mandated translatio studii, the Bibles historiales commissioned by and for Charles V made their own contribution to the valorization of the French people as a chosen 122 Aden Kumler nation with privileged access to divine wisdom in their native language. The Bibles historiales associated with Charles V and his intimates were, however, not simply translations from one language to another. Teeming with miniatures, these manuscripts suggest that when the French King fist translater Holy Writ, images were an integral part of that translation. It is hardly coincidental that the period in which the identification of the French as God’s chosen people flourished also witnessed repeated expulsions of the Jews from the kingdom. The efficacy of the crown’s attempts to empty France of Jews and the motives that prompted the monarchy to such action are still topics of debate.97 Nonetheless, the expulsions of the Jews undertaken by French kings, culminating in the expulsion of 1306 ordered by Philip IV,98 suggest that a conceptual split had been effectively accomplished between the exempla of Biblical Jews employed in royalist propaganda and the living Jews of thirteenth- and fourteenthcentury France.99 In the actual or imagined absence of a Jewish presence in France, the figure of ‘the Biblical Jew’ may have become yet more available and acceptable as an image of the new ‘Israel of the Spirit.’ When Charles V, acting in his father’s name, authorized the Jews’ return to the kingdom ca. 1359, he inaugurated a new—if briefly-lived—period of renewed royal tolerance.100 As Roger Kohn has discussed, the crown’s treatment of the Jews focused on the protection of a constellation of economic relations, privileging the economic activities of the Jews and the revenues collected from Jewish communities by the royal Treasury.101 The protections extended to individual Jews and Jewish communities by the crown were not sufficient to protect the Jews of Paris from the violence and looting of riots in 1380 and 1382.102 In the polemical context fostered by Capetian and Valois claims to divine favor, there was precious little conceptual space within ‘most-Christian’ France to accommodate the spiritual authority or authenticity of Judaei moderni.103 Building on the polemical foundation laid during Louis IX’s reign, elite fourteenth-century French Christians could—and did—appropriate the Old Testament’s righteous Israelites as behavioral exemplars. Like the Tablets of the Old Law in the Houghton Bible historiale’s frontispiece, the patriarchs and prophets were firmly translated into the ideological and theological spaces of French royal self-fashioning. The example of the Houghton Bible historiale suggests that for Charles V, and the elite circle of his intimates, images were a privileged means of accomplishing this conceptual translation. Serving as framework, gloss, and visualized interpretation, the miniatures of Charles V’s Bible historiale make visible the import of the vernacular text that they punctuate.104 The lenses of Christian exegesis and a particularly French polemic confer a kind of spiritual perspicuity upon the viewer of these images: within their frames the viewer can see the emptied and illegible contents of ‘what used to Faire translater, faire historier 123 be’ the supports for the texts of Hebrew wisdom. The interpretive failure of the manuscript’s fictive Israelites is made visible in their blank or illegible texts. In their place Christian exegesis, Christian texts, and Christian sacramental practice recuperate the divine sapience entrusted to Moses and the prophets. Reinscribed in a different language by a new chosen people, the texts of Old Testament witness regain their legibility in the vernacular folios of Charles V’s Bible historiale. Identified as a holy orator, an authoritative grammarian, and the divinely mandated provider of Holy Writ to his people in their native language, the figure of Moses must have resonated with le Roi Sage as he undertook his own campaign of translations.105 Playing an active role in the realization of God’s presence in the French language, did Charles V see Moses’ blank book as a foil to his own densely written and painted Bible historiale? As the Houghton manuscript’s images visually proclaim Hebrew’s loss of divine wisdom and display the visible signs of a Christian recovery of that wisdom, they embed this translatio in a conceptual framework that far exceeds the terms of Guiard des Moulins’s or Petrus Comestor’s texts. Working in concert with the vernacular translation that surrounds them, the manuscript’s miniatures suggest that the resting place of God’s fugitive presence in language may indeed be the French spoken and read at Charles V’s court. The terms of these spiritually- and politically-charged linguistics are not articulated in the text of the Bible historiale: rather, it is the manuscript’s images that polemically frame the words they accompany. The translatio studii that brought wisdom from the lands of antiquity to fourteenth-century Paris, appropriating the divine presence for a Christian vernacular, was realized not simply by textual translation, but also by Charles V’s desire to faire translater Latin sapientia into both vernacular text and visual representation, producing a Bible historiale that was polemically historiée. NOTES It is a pleasure to thank Jeffrey Hamburger, Nicholas Watson, and Henri Zerner for their insightful and instructive responses to earlier states of this article. I presented a condensed version of this argument at the Medieval Academy of America’s 2006 Annual Meeting; I am grateful to Lillian Randall for including me in the session she organized on “Vernacular Idioms in Text and Image.” I would also like to thank the two anonymous readers for Studies in Iconography whose criticism and comments were an invaluable help. Hope Mayo, Philip Hofer Curator of the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, and William Stoneman, Florence Fearrington Librarian of the Houghton Library at Harvard University, allowed me to spend many hours with MS Typ 555 in the collegial space of the Houghton Library reading room; I am most grateful for their curatorial generosity and encouragement. 1. For the Bibles Historiales listed in inventories of Charles V’s Library, see Léopold Delisle, Recherches sur la librairie de Charles V, roi de France, 1337–1380, (Paris: H. Champion, 1907; rpt. Amsterdam: Gérard Th. van Heusden, 1967), 2:20. 124 Aden Kumler 2. Cambridge, Houghton Library, Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, MS Typ 555 (olim fMS Typ 555; hereafter, HBh) survives in two volumes of 293 and 274 folios; both volumes are 300 x 210 mm. The manuscript contains 129 miniatures, including the large frontispiece to the first volume (vol. 1, fol. 1r). The original frontispiece to the second volume has been replaced with an eighteenth-century leaf. For a full description of the manuscript, with further bibliography, see Roger S. Wieck, Late Medieval and Renaissance Illuminated Manuscripts, 1350–1525 in the Houghton Library (Cambridge, MA: The Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Harvard College Library, 1983), 2–3, 136–37. 3. In addition to HBh, an illuminated Cité de Dieu at the Houghton Library (MS Typ 201), once owned by Jean duc de Berry but likely commissioned for Charles V, also witnesses to the collaboration of the Master of the Livre du Sacre de Charles V and the Master of the Coronation of Charles VI. For further discussion and examples of collaboration between these artists, see François Avril, “La Bible Historiale de Charles V (fMS Typ 555),” in The Marks in the Fields: Essays on the Uses of Manuscripts, ed. Rodney G. Dennis with Elizabeth Falsey (Cambridge, MA: The Houghton Library, 1992), 98–99; Les Fastes du gothique: Le siècle de Charles V, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, 9 octobre 1981-1er février 1982, (Paris: Ministère de la culture; Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1981), 329–31 (no. 284); Claire Richter Sherman, Imaging Aristotle: Verbal and Visual Representation in Fourteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 43, 178, 209, 241–44, 272–73, 279, 282–83, 304. 4. Avril, “La Bible Historiale,” 96–99, Wieck, Illuminated Manuscripts, 2. 5. Avril, “La Bible Historiale,” 99. 6. On Charles V’s library, see François Avril and Jean Lafaurie, eds., La Librairie de Charles V (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1968); Delisle, Recherches; Marie-Hélène Tesnière, “La librairie modèle,” in Paris et Charles V: Arts et architecture, ed. Frédéric Pleybert, Collection Paris et son Patrimoine (Paris: Action artistique de la Ville de Paris, 2001), 225–34 (with further bibliography). 7. As Claire Richter Sherman has explored, Charles V was celebrated within his lifetime as a paragon of sagesse. In her study of the illuminated manuscripts of Nicole Oresme’s translations of Aristotle made for Charles V, Sherman examines in detail how text and image in these manuscripts frame the relationship between science and sapience for the edification (and praise) of their royal recipient; she notes: “The various mentions of Charles V’s “Sapience” in dedicatory poems and prologues to translations are more than literary convention. For him, as well as for Oresme, the happiness of the contemplative life was a concept that had personal meaning and merited special honor in the climactic illustration of the king’s personal copy of Oresme’s translation of the Ethics,” Sherman, Imaging Aristotle, 174. For Sherman’s insightful analysis of the differentiation of Sapience (Theoretical Wisdom) from Science (Knowledge) in images designed for Oresme’s Aristotelian translations and commentaries, see Sherman, Imaging Aristotle, 121–30, 163–72. The Aristotelian Sapience that concerned Oresme in these works was, of course, not identical with Christian theological conceptions of Sapience as a divine form of knowledge, transmitted through Scripture and concerned with the Deity and divine things. As Sherman notes, although the representation of Félicité contemplative devised (and revised) for Oresme’s translation of Aristotle attempted to reconcile these two authorities, “. . .the ambiguities of the philosophical/theological context of this illustration [i.e., of Félicite contemplative] may reflect the wavering in [Oresme’s] scientific views between orthodox Christian beliefs and ‘radical philosophical ideas’,” Sherman, Imaging Aristotle, 174. The Bible historiale, as a vernacular translation of and commentary on Scripture, did not pose the same dilemma to its makers and audience; nonetheless, the design and execution of its visual program provided an opportunity for glossing the relationship between divine Sapientia and vernacular Sapience. 8. On Guiard’s translation and adaptation of Petrus Comestor’s text, and the reception of Guiard’s work, see Pierre-Maurice Bogaert, “Adaptations et versions de la Bible en prose (langue d’oïl),” in Les Genres littéraires dans les sources théologiques et philosophiques médiévales: Définition, critique et exploitation, Actes du Colloque international de Louvain-la-Neuve, 25–27 mai 1981, Faire translater, faire historier 125 Publications de l’Institut d’Études médiévales. 2e série: Textes, Études, Congrés, vol. 5 (Louvain-laNeuve: Institut d’Études médiévales de l’Université Catholique de Louvain, 1982), 259–77; Rosemarie Potz McGerr, “Guyart Desmoulins, the Vernacular Master of Histories, and his Bible Historiale,” Viator 14 (1983): 211–44. 9. Samuel Berger, La Bible française au Moyen Age: Étude sur les plus anciennes versions de la Bible écrites en prose de langue d’oïl (Genève: Slatkine Reprints, 1967), 187–99. 10. Ibid. Berger’s observation has been repeated and substantially expanded in Bogaert, “Adaptations et versions de la Bible,” 273–75; Clive R. Sneddon, “The ‘Bible du XIIIe Siècle’: Its Medieval Public In the Light of Its Manuscript Tradition,” in The Bible and Medieval Culture, ed. W. Lourdaux and D. Verhelst (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1979), 127–40. 11. McGerr, “Guyart Desmoulins,” 219. 12. I have not been able to consult Akiko Komada’s 2000 doctoral thesis on the visual programs of northern French Bible historiale manuscripts: Akiko Komada, “Les illustrations de la Bible historiale: les manuscrits réalisés dans le nord” (Thèse de Doctorat Nouveau Régime, Université de Paris IV, 2000). 13. Berger provides a list of 72 manuscripts in his classification of the Bibles historiales complétées known to him in 1884. Bogaert has suggested that Berger’s tally may be expanded to 75 extant copies of volume one of the text, Bogaert, “Adaptations et versions de la Bible,” 275. Bogaert does not supply shelfmarks for the manuscripts included in his count. For Berger’s classification see Berger, La Bible Française, 210–20. 14. The manuscripts considered by my modest survey are: Baltimore, Walters Art Gallery MS 126; Staatsbibl., Phill. 1906; BR, MS 9001; HBh; BL, Royal 17.E.VII; Geneva, Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire, MS fr. 2; the Hague, Bibliothèque Royale des Pays-Bas, MS 71 A 23; the Hague, Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum, MS 10 B 23; BL, Royal 19.D.II; Malibu, J. Paul Getty Museum, MS 1; NYPL, MS Spencer 4; Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS, 5057–58; Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 5059; Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 5212; Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale Française, MS fr. 159; St. Petersburg, National Library of Russia, MS Fr. F. v. I. 1/1–2; Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, MS Bibl. 2o 6. 15. For the Arsenal and Kunsthalle volumes see François Avril, “Une Bible Historiale de Charles V, ” Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunstsammlungen 14–15 (1970): 45–76, Jeffrey Hamburger, “The Medieval Work of Art: Wherein the “Work”? Wherein the “Art”?” in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 374–412. 16. M. W. Evans, “Boethius and an Illustration to the Bible Historiale,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 30 (1967): 394–98. This Bible historiale, ca. 1400, once belonged to Jean duc de Berry, Charles V’s brother. 17. Hamburger, “Medieval Work of Art,” 381. 18. Although it is not noted in Roger Wieck’s entry or in François Avril’s brief notice of the manuscript, an examination of HBh’s frontispiece miniature reveals traces of over-painting in the face, hair, and hands of the figure of the Divinity and in sections of his garment. I concur with Jeffrey Hamburger’s suggestion that this over-painting represents a modification to the image at some time after the first campaign of illumination. Although several subsequent folios (particularly in the second volume of HBh) have suffered from water damage or have been replaced (probably as a result of such damage), the first folio of volume one of HBh does not seem to have been damaged. The repainting of the figure of the Divinity may, therefore, be attributed to some aesthetic motivation, perhaps a desire to ‘update’ the first, most prominent, image in the manuscript. As the repainting does not substantially alter the composition of the miniature, I shall not consider it germane to my argument. For Wieck’s description of the manuscript see note 2, above. For Avril’s discussion of the manuscript see note 3, above. 19. For analyses of medieval representations of the Tablets of the Law, see Israel Abrahams, 126 Aden Kumler “The Decalogue in Art,” in Studies in Jewish Literature: Issued in Honor of Professor Kaufmann Kohler, PH.D (Berlin: Georg Reimer, Publisher and Printer, 1913), 39–55; Bernhard Blumenkranz, “Géographie historique d’un thème de l’iconographie réligieuse: les représentations de Synagoga en France,” in Mélanges offerts à René Crozet à l’occasion de son soixante-dixième anniversaire, par ses amis, ses collègues, ses élèves et les membres du C.É.S.C.M., ed. Pierre Gallais and Yves Jean Rion (Poitiers: Société d’Études Mediévales, 1966), vol. 2, 1141–57; Bernhard Blumenkranz, Le Juif médiéval au miroir de l’art chrétien (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1966), 410–19, 124; Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 181; Michael Camille, “Visual Signs of the Sacred Page: Books in the Bible Moralisée,” Word & Image 5, no. 1 (1989): 111–30; Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisée, The S. Mark Taper Foundation Imprint in Jewish Studies, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 54–81; Ruth Mellinkoff, The Horned Moses in Medieval Art and Thought, California Studies in the History of Art 14 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1970); Ruth Mellinkoff, “The Round-Topped Tablets of the Law: Sacred Symbol and Emblem of Evil,” Journal of Jewish Art 1 (1974): 28–43; Joseph Reider, “Jews in Medieval Art,” in Essays on Antisemitism, ed. Koppel S. Pinson, Jewish Social Studies, Publications 2 (New York: Conference on Jewish Relations, 1942), 94; G. B. Sarfatti, “The Tables of the Covenant as a Symbol of Judaism (English Summary of Hebrew Article),” Tarbiz: A Quarterly for Jewish Studies 29, no. 4 (1960): iv–v; Wolfgang S. Seiferth, Synagogue and Church in the Middle Ages: Two Symbols in Art and Literature, trans. Lee Chadeayne and Paul Gottwald (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1970). 20. Jeffrey Hamburger, “Body vs. Book: The Trope of Visibility in Images of Christian-Jewish Polemic,” in Ästhetik des Unsichtbaren: Bildtheorie und Bildgebrauch in der Vormoderne, ed. David Ganz, Thomas Lentes, and Georg Henkel, KultBild, Bd. 1 (Berlin: Reimer, 2004), 130–31. Many of the examples discussed here, and by Hamburger, were first cited (as noted by Hamburger) in Peter Burkhart, “Eine widerentdeckte Bible historiale aus der königlichen Bibliothek im Louvre: Stuttgart, WLB Cod. Bibl. 2o 6,” Scriptorium 53 (1999): 192. It should be noted that there are two extant witnesses to this type of Majestas that predate all the manuscript examples discussed below. They are (1) a twelfth-century enamel plaque in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Acc. No. 17.190.446) featuring the Divinity holding a sword and keys, seated between the Tablets of the Law, the jar of manna and Aaron’s flowering rod (on the right) and a chalice and paten (on the left); and (2) an ivory Vierge ouvrante in the Walters Art Gallery (Acc. No. 71.152) from the priory of Boubon, Cussac (France), usually dated ca. 1200, but of disputed authenticity, featuring an adult Christ seated between the Tablets and the Eucharistic elements within a quatrefoil embrasure on the Virgin’s lap. The specific iconographic assemblage of the enamel plaque would seem to inflect its rhetorical juxtaposition of the sub lege witnesses with the sub gratie sacramental species in a fashion not taken up by later witnesses to this Majestas variant. For the enamel plaque, attributed to the workshop of Godefroid de Claire, see Joseph Breck, “Notes on Some Mosan Enamels,” Metropolitan Museum Studies 1 (1928): 87-88, fig. 9; Marie-Madeleine Gauthier, “Les Couvertures précieuses des manuscrits à l’usage de la Sainte-Chapelle,” in Septième centenaire de la mort de saint Louis: Actes des colloques de Royaumont et de Paris, 21–27 mai 1970 (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1976), 160 n. 2; Nigel Morgan, “The Iconography of Twelfth Century Mosan Enamels,” in Rhein und Maas: Kunst und Kultur, 800–1400, ed. Anton Legner (Köln: Schnütgen-Museum, 1973), 275 n. 166; Philippe Verdier, “Emaux mosans et rheno-mosans dans les collections des États-Unis,” Revue Belge d’Archéologie et d’Histoire de l’Art 44 (for 1975) (1976): 60–62; idem, “La grande croix de l’abbé Suger à Saint-Denis,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 13 (1970): 25, fig. 16. For the ivory Vierge ouvrante, see Peter Barnet, ed., Images in Ivory: Precious Objects of the Gothic Age (Detroit, MI: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1997), 285–89; Kelly Holbert, “The Vindication of a Controversial Early Thirteenth-Century Vierge Ouvrante in the Walters Art Gallery,” Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 55/56 (1997/1998): 101–21 (with a summary of the controversy concerning its authenticity and dating); Gudrun Radler, Die Faire translater, faire historier 127 Schreinmadonna “Vierge ouvrante”: Von den bernhardinischen Anfängen bis zur Frauenmystik im Deutschordensland; Mit beschreibendem Katalog, Frankfurter Fundamente der Kunstgeschichte 6 (Frankfurt am Main: Kunstgeschichtliches Institut der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, 1990), 51–55, 203–9, no. 1 (with further bibliography). I am obliged to Robyn Fleming of the Metropolitan Museum’s Central Catalog who kindly responded to my queries about the enamel. 21. Discussed and reproduced in: Hamburger, “Body vs. Book,” 130–31. Also reproduced in Maurits Smeyers, Flemish Miniatures from the 8th to the mid-16th Century: The Medieval World on Parchment (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1999), 117. 22. The following list notes witnesses to this particular type of Majestas in chronological order, with relevant bibliography. A Missal for the Abbey of Sainte-Geneviève, dated after 1253 (Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, MS 90): Robert Branner, Manuscript Painting in Paris During the Reign of Saint Louis: A Study of Styles, California Studies in the History of Art 18 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 100–1, 229, figs. 283–84. The lower cover of the third Evangeliary of the Sainte-Chapelle, dated ca. 1255–70 (to be discussed further below). A Missal for the use of Paris, perhaps intended for the use of Louis X le Hutin, dated ca. 1315 (BnF, lat. 861): Les Fastes du gothique, 283, no. 228 (with further bibliography). A Latin-French Psalter for the use of SaintVictor (Paris), dated after 1347 (BnF, fr. 962): Victor Leroquais, Les psautiers: Manuscrits latins des bibliothèques publiques de France, 3 vols. (Maçon: Protat frères, 1940–41), 143–44, pl. 112. The Houghton Bible Historiale, dated 1373. A Civitate dei in two volumes (BL, Add. 15244–45), illuminated by the Master of the Livre du Sacre de Charles V and the Master of the Coronation of Charles VI (among others) for Charles V ca. 1370–76; this example was kindly brought to my attention by Marcia Kupfer: Sharon Off Dunlap Smith, “Illustrations of Raoul de Praelles’ Translation of St. Augustine’s City of God between 1375 and 1420” (Ph.D. diss., New York Univ., 1974), 212–14, fig. 15. The Petites heures of Jean duc de Berry, ca. 1375–80 (BnF, lat. 18104): François Avril, Louisa Dunlop, and Brunsdon Yapp, Les Petites heures du duc de Berry, 2 vols. (Luzern: Faksimile Verlag, 1988–89), Les Fastes du gothique, 343–44, no. 297 (with further bibliography). And finally, a Bible historiale, once part of the royal library in the Louvre, dated ca. 1380 (Stuttgart, Würtembergische Landesbibliothek, MS Bibl. 2o 6): Burkhart, “Eine widerentdeckte Bible historiale,” Delisle, Recherches, 2:20, no. 100. For further examples and discussion of this Majestas variant, see Hamburger, “Medieval Work of Art,” 399. 23. BnF, lat. 17326: Jannic Durand and Marie-Pierre Laffitte, eds., Le trésor de la Sainte-Chapelle (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2001), 159–62, Gauthier, “Les Couvertures précieuses,” 159– 63. The dating of the lower cover remains vexed. In her entry on the cover, Élisabeth Antoine dates it to 1260: Un trésor gothique: La châsse de Nivelles, Cologne, Schnütgen-Museum, 24 novembre 1995–11 février 1996: Paris, Musée national du Moyen Age, Thermes de Cluny, 12 mars-10 juin 1996 (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1996), 306–7, no. 15 (with further bibliography). Robert Suckale has argued for a date as early as 1255: Robert Suckale, “Überlegungen zur Pariser Skulptur unter König Ludwig dem Heiligen (1236–70) und König Philipp dem Schönen (1285–1314),” in Das mittelalterliche Bild als Zeitzeuge: sechs Studien (Berlin: Lukas, 2002), 130. 24. Anne D. Hedeman, The Royal Image: Illustrations of the Grandes Chroniques de France, 1274–1422, California Studies in the History of Art 28 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 98, 102–5, 124–26; idem, “Valois Legitimacy: Editorial Changes in Charles V’s Grandes Chroniques de France,” Art Bulletin 66 (1984): 104–10. 25. For further discussion of Charles V’s emulation of Louis IX, as realized by visual means, see Elizabeth Danbury, “English and French Artistic Propaganda during the Period of the Hundred Years War: Some Evidence from Royal Charters,” in Power, Culture, and Religion in France, c. 1350–c. 1550, ed. Christopher Allmand (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 1989), 95; Hedeman, Royal Image, 124–26; idem, “Valois Legitimacy,” 104–10; Claire Richter Sherman, The Portraits of Charles V of France (1338–1380), Monographs on Archaeology and the Fine Arts 20 (New York: Published by New York University Press for the College Art Association of America, 1969), 13. 128 Aden Kumler 26. HBh, vol. 1, fol. 53r B (miniature), 53v A (text). 27. “Li maistres en hystoires dist et voirs est qu’il vint à la montaingne de synay qui en l’une des ses parties est appellée oreb.” HBh, vol. 1, fol. 53v A. 28. The Houghton manuscript’s Christomorphic representation of the voice heard by Moses at Mount Horeb is entirely consistent with contemporary iconographic treatments of this biblical episode. For further discussion of the iconographic devices developed to represent Moses’ encounter with the burning bush see François Boespflug, “Un étrange spectacle: Le buisson ardent comme théophanie dans l’art occidental,” Revue de l’Art 97 (1992): 11–31. 29. “N’aproche mie ci mais oste tes chauciers de tes piez car li lieus ou tu es est terre sainte.” HBh, vol. 1, fol. 53v A. 30. Examining various visual treatments for this episode, Boespflug notes the dialogic emphasis of the iconographic type employed in the Houghton manuscript’s miniature: Boespflug, “Un étrange spectacle,” 26. 31. “Sire ie ne parolle mie bien Ains ay la langue empeeschiée.” HBh, vol. 1, fol. 54r A. 32. “Je parolle mauuaisement.” HBh, vol. 1, fol. 55v B. 33. The episode is found in Exodus 7 in the Vulgate. 34. “Comment les verges furent muées en couleuurez selonc la bible.” HBh, vol. 1, fol. 55v B. 35. HBh, vol. 1, fol. 54r B. 36. HBh, vol. 1, fol. 55v B. 37. The miniature’s representation of Pharaoh with the insignia of the French monarchy is not an isolated example in the Houghton Bible historiale. In the scenes of Joseph before Pharaoh (HBh, vol. 1, fol. 43r B), David presiding over the beheading of the Amalekite (HBh, vol. 1, fol. 155r B), a King receiving a letter in the miniature for 1 Maccabees (HBh, vol. 2, fol. 135v), and King Titus receiving St. Paul’s Epistle (HBh, vol. 3, fol. 243r B) each royal figure wears a crown with fleurs-delis terminals and sits upon a faldstool. 38. For discussion of the fleurs-de-lis, see Colette Beaune, The Birth of an Ideology: Myths and Symbols of Nation in Late-Medieval France, trans. Susan Ross Huston (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 201–25; Danbury, “English and French Artistic Propaganda”; Sandra Hindman and Gabrielle Spiegel, “The Fleur-de-lis Frontispieces to Guillaume de Nangis’ Chronique abrégée: Political Iconography in Late Fifteenth-Century France,” Viator 12 (1981): 381–407; William M. Hinkle, The Fleurs de Lis of the Kings of France, 1285–1488 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991). 39. Blaise comte de Montesquiou-Fezensac and Danielle Gaborit-Chopin, Le trésor de SaintDenis, vol. 1 (Paris: A. et J. Picard, 1973), 116-18; Marie-Hélène Tesnière and Prosser Gifford, Creating French Culture: Treasures from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Washington: Library of Congress; Paris: Bibliotheque nationale de France, 1995), 42–43. 40. Daniel H. Weiss, “Biblical History and Medieval Historiography: Rationalizing Strategies in Crusader Art,” Modern Language Notes 108, no. 4 (1993): 717; Daniel H. Weiss, Art and Crusade in the Age of Saint Louis (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 172. 41. Sherman notes the faldstool’s presence in representations of Charles V and provides reproductions of numerous images featuring this royal accessory: Sherman, Portraits of Charles V, 23, and ills. 1, 2, 4–5, 7, 9, 11, 13–15, 17–19, 21–22, 32, 72, 73. Sherman further notes that the crown and faldstool provided for the figure of the king in a dedication miniature (in Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert Ier, MS 9505–6), “establish the royal identity of Charles V,” Sherman, Imaging Aristotle, 50. For other images of French kings seated on this type of faldstool, see Hedeman, Royal Image, figs. 18-19, 21, 76, 79, 85, 89. 42. If the investment of the Israelites’ persecutor with the identity of a French monarch seems an awkward, if not deeply problematic, move in a manuscript destined for the gaze of Charles V, we might remind ourselves that French kings and illuminators alike invested pagan royalty of the Faire translater, faire historier 129 past with the insignia of the Parisian present. As Elizabeth Brown has written: “From early on the realm’s leaders identified themselves and were identified with heroes (and villains) of the past; kings were seen as virtual reincarnations of figures both secular and biblical—Charlemagne, David, and sometimes Pharaoh,” Elizabeth A. R. Brown, “The Religion of Royalty From Saint Louis to Henry IV (1226–1589),” in Creating French Culture: Treasures from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, ed. Marie-Hélène Tesnière and Prosser Gifford (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress; Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1995), 139. For portraits of Charles V, in addition to Sherman’s important study (cited in notes 25 and 41 above), see Donal Byrne, “Rex Imago Dei: Charles V of France and the Livre des propiétés des choses,” Journal of Medieval History 7 (1981): 97–113; Danbury, “English and French Artistic Propaganda”; Jennifer F. Fields-Crow, “Controlling Images: Portraits of Charles V as Representations of His Political Agenda in Fourteenth Century France,” Athanor 12 (1993): 27–33; Georgia Sommers Wright, “The Reinvention of the Portrait Likeness in the Fourteenth Century,” Gesta 39 (2000): 117–34. 43. For a helpful discussion of speech as a moral act and potentially dangerous force in late medieval pastoral literature, see Edwin D. Craun, Lies, Slander, and Obscenity in Medieval English Literature: Pastoral Rhetoric and the Deviant Speaker, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 31 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 44. “The Law and the Ten Commandments were given by parole.” HBh, vol. 1, fol. 65r A–B. 45. This representation of the Mosaic Law as a book, rather than tablets, has many precedents in the medieval West. For further examples and discussion, see Camille, “Visual Signs of the Sacred Page,” Mellinkoff, “The Round-Topped Tablets of the Law,” 29. 46. The book held in Moses’ hands must therefore stand for both the book of the New Covenant and the inscription of the Ten Commandments. The Vulgate Exodus account details three separate moments of inscription, fraction, and re-inscription in the transmission of the Law: Exodus 24:7 and 12 (Moses reads from the “book of the covenant” and is commanded to receive Tablets written by God); Exodus 31:18 (Moses receives the Tablets written by the finger of God); Exodus 32:15–16 and 19 (Moses breaks the Tablets); and Exodus 34:1, 4, 27–29 (Moses inscribes new tablets). 47. BL, Harley 4381, fol. 86v; dated ca. 1400. Reproduced in: John Alexander Herbert, ed., Reproductions from Illuminated Manuscripts: Series II, 2nd ed. (London: Printed by order of the Trustees, 1910), 11, no. 24, pl. 24. See also note 16 above. 48. HBh, vol. 1, fol. 107v B. 49. Moreover, the legible texts found in the manuscript’s final images (attributed to the Master of the Coronation of Charles VI; figs. 19–22) confirm the import and signifying status of the visual program’s systematic effacement of the contents of Hebrew text. This exceptional treatment of fictive writing supports will be discussed further below. 50. “Et nous desseurames que nous n’oyssons la vois de notre seingneur.” HBh, vol. 2, fol. 88r A. 51. “Notre sires est droituriers en toutes choses qu’il nous a commandées. Et nous n’auons pas oyé sa vois. Si que nous alissions aus commandemens notre siengneur lesquieus il a manifestez deuant nostre face . . . nous auons pechié et ouuré felonnessement.” HBh, vol. 2, fol. 88r B. 52. “Recoif mes paroles si que tu saches sapience.” HBh, vol. 2, fol. 88v B. 53. HBh, vol. 2, fol. 129v A. 54. “Lamentations et ire et douleur.” HBh, vol. 2, fol. 90v (miniature) and fol. 91r B (text). 55. HBh, vol. 2, fol. 134v A. 56. Judah M. Rosenthal, “The Talmud on Trial: The Disputation at Paris in the Year 1240,” The Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s., 47 (1956): 70–71. 57. The ‘trials’ of the Talmud and the polemic surrounding them have generated an extensive bibliography, and much debate; for further discussion and bibliography, see Nicole Bériou, “Entre sottises et blasphèmes: Échos de la dénonciation du Talmud dans quelques sermons du XIIIe siècle,” in Le brûlement du Talmud à Paris: 1242–1244, ed. Gilbert Dahan and Élie Nicolas, Nouvelle Gallia Judaïca (Paris: Cerf, 1999), 211–37; Robert Chazan, “The Condemnation of the Talmud Reconsid- 130 Aden Kumler ered (1239–1248),” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 55 (1988): 11–30; idem, “The Hebrew Report on the Trial of the Talmud: Information and Consolation,” in Le brûlement du Talmud à Paris, 79–93; Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 60–99; idem, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 313–63; Gilbert Dahan, “Introduction: Textes et contextes de l’affaire du Talmud,” in Le brûlement du Talmud à Paris, 14–16; Yvonne Friedman, “Anti-Talmudic Invective from Peter the Venerable to Nicolas Donin (1144–1244),” in Le brûlement du Talmud à Paris, 171–89; William C. Jordan, “Marian Devotion and the Talmud Trial of 1240,” in Religionsgespräche im Mittelalter (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1992), 61–76, rpt. in Ideology and Royal Power in Medieval France: Kingship, Crusades, and the Jews, Variorum Collected Studies Series CS705 (Aldershot; Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2001); Isidore Loeb, “La Controvèrse de 1240 sur le Talmud [Pt. I],” Revue des études juives 1 (1880): 247–62; idem, “La Controvèrse de 1240 sur le Talmud [Pt. II],” Revue des études juives 2 (1881): 248–70; idem, “La Controvèrse de 1240 sur le Talmud [Pt. III],” Revue des études juives 3 (1881): 38–57; Gérard Nahon, “Les Ordonnances de Saint Louis sur les juifs,” Les nouveaux cahiers 6, no. 23 (1970): 22; Joel E. Rembaum, “The Talmud and the Popes: Reflections on the Talmud Trials of the 1240s,” Viator 13 (1982): 203–23; Rosenthal, “Talmud on Trial”; André Tuilier, “La condamnation du Talmud par les maîtres universitaires parisiens, ses Causes et ses conséquences politiques et idéologiques,” in Le brûlement du Talmud à Paris, 59–78. 58. “. . . ipsi enim, sicut accepimus, lege veteri, quam Dominus per Mosysen in scriptis edidit, non contenti, immo penitus praetermittentes eandem, affirmant legem aliam, quae Talmud, id est doctrina, dicitur, et Dominum edidisse ac verbo Moysi traditam et insertam eorum mentibus mentiuntur, tamdiu sine scriptis servatam, donec quidam venerunt, quos sapientes et scribas appellant, qui eam, ne per oblivionem a mentibus hominum laberetur, in scripturam cujus volumen in immensum excedit textum Bibliae redegerunt. . . .” Edited in Shlomo Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews: Documents: 492–1404, Studies and Texts 94 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1988), 172. Translation, which I have modified slightly, from Solomon Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century: A Study of Their Relations During the Years 1198–1254, Based on the Papal Letters and the Conciliar Decrees of the Period, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Hermon Press, 1966), 241. Cited by Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, 322. It should be noted that this passage from Gregory IX’s letter of 9 June 1239 essentially recapitulates charges against the Talmud articulated in the dossier presented to the pope by Nicholas Donin in ca. 1368–69; for further discussion and interpretation, see Chazan, “Condemnation of the Talmud,” 13–19, 21, Rembaum, “Talmud and the Popes,” 205–6, 215. 59. On Eudes of Châteauroux, see David Behrman, “Volumina vilissima, a Sermon of Eudes of Châteauroux on the Jews and their Talmud,” in Le brûlement du Talmud à Paris, 191–209; Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, 323; Marie-Madeleine Lebreton, “Eudes de Châteauroux,” in Dictionnaire de spiritualité: Ascétique et mystique, doctrine et histoire, ed. Marcel Viller, et al. (Paris: G. Beauchesne et ses fils, 1961), vol. 4, no. 2, cols. 1675–78; Christoph T. Maier, “Crusade and Rhetoric against the Muslim Colony of Lucera: Eudes of Châteauroux’s Sermones de Rebellione Sarracenorum Lucherie in Apulia,” Journal of Medieval History 21 (1995): 343–85; idem, Crusade Propaganda and Ideology: Model Sermons for the Preaching of the Cross (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Rembaum, “Talmud and the Popes,” 217–21. 60. “. . . inventum est quod dicti libri erroribus erant pleni, et est velamen positum super corda ipsorum in tantum, ut non solum ab intellectu spirituali Judeos avertant, immo etiam a litterali. . . .” Latin text and English translation (which I have modified slightly) provided by Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century: A Study of Their Relations During the Years 1198–1254, Based on the Papal Letters and the Conciliar Decrees of the Period, 276–78. Cited by Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, 324. 61. For the change, from Augustinian toleration to violent persecution, in Christian attitudes to- Faire translater, faire historier 131 wards the Jews see Cohen, Friars and the Jews; Jeremy Cohen, “The Jews as the Killers of Christ in the Latin Tradition, From Augustine to the Friars,” Traditio 39 (1983): 1–27; Cohen, Living Letters of the Law; Jeremy Cohen, “The Muslim Connection or On the Changing Role of the Jew in High Medieval Theology,” in From Witness to Witchcraft: Jews and Judaism in Medieval Christian Thought, ed. Jeremy Cohen, Wolfenbütteler Mittelalter-Studien 11 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1996), 141–62; Hyam Maccoby, Judaism on Trial: Jewish-Christian Disputations in the Middle Ages, The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1982); Irven M. Resnick, “The Falsification of Scripture and Medieval Christian and Jewish Polemics,” Medieval Encounters 2 (1996): 344–80, Rosenthal, “Talmud on Trial.” 62. Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, 23–71. 63. “Non sunt ergo occisi in eo, quod non sunt, quae apud eos legebantur et audiebatur, obliti. Si enim scripturas sanctas, quamuis eas non intellegant, penitus obliuiscerentur, in ipso Iudaico ritu occiderentur, quia, cum legis et prophertarum nihil nossent, Iudaei prodesse non possent,” Augustine, De fide rerum invisibilium: Aurelii Augustini Opera; pars XIII, 2, CCL 46 (Turnholti: Typographi Brepols, 1969), 16 (VI, 9). Cited and translated in Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, 38–39. 64. Irven Resnick provides a succinct summary of the post-1240 construction of the Jews: “[They did not] continue to observe the Mosaic Law, safeguarding their biblical religion. Having abandoned the Bible for the Talmud, they were guilty of forgetting the Law and the Lord. Deprived of this positive role in Christian society, all that remained of the Augustinian model of toleration was that the Jews should suffer every degradation in order to reveal more fully that God had rejected them in order to pour out his divine love and compassion upon the Church, the New Israel.” Resnick, “Falsification of Scripture,” 380. 65. The dating of this burning of Jewish books remains debated, as do the precise quantities of books destroyed; see Dahan, “Introduction: Textes et contextes,” 14–16; Rosenthal, “Talmud on Trial,” 72; Colette Sirat, “Les manuscrits du Talmud en France du Nord au XIIIe siècle,” in Le brûlement du Talmud à Paris, 121–39; Tuilier, “La condamnation du Talmud,” 62–67. 66. HBh, vol. 2, fol. 206v A. 67. HBh, vol. 2, fol. 188v B. 68. HBh, vol. 2, fol. 161r A. 69. HBh, vol. 2, fol. 177v B. 70. For a helpful re-evaluation of categories of medieval literacy and illiteracy see Franz H. Bäuml, “Varieties and Consequences of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy,” Speculum 55 (1980): 237–65. 71. HBh, vol. 1, fol. 7r B. 72. On the nomina sacra, see Bernhard Bischoff, Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Dáibhí ó Cróinín and David Ganz (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 152–55; Henri Leclercq, “Nomina Sacra,” in DACL, ed. Fernand Cabrol and Henri Leclercq (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1907), vol. 12, pt. 2, cols. 1478–81; Suzanne Lewis, “Sacred Calligraphy: the Chi Rho Page in the Book of Kells,” Traditio 36 (1980): 139–59; Ludwig Traube, Nomina sacra: Versuch einer Geschichte der christlichen Kürzung, Quellen und Untersuchungen zur lateinischen Philologie des Mittelalters 2 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1967). 73. For a discussion of competing theological and visual conceptions of the role of the three persons of the Trinity in the creation, see Conrad Rudolph, “In the Beginning: Theories and Images of Creation in Northern Europe in the Twelfth Century,” Art History 22 (1999): 3–55. 74. This ornamental vocabulary is continued throughout the manuscript in the vertical chains of halved fleurs-de-lis executed in red, blue, and gold that define the left edge of text columns. Avril identifies this ornamentation as characteristic of royal manuscripts in the period: Avril, “La Bible Historiale,” 98. 75. These ornamental elements belong to an iconography of ownership that is not restricted to 132 Aden Kumler religious manuscripts in the period: see Avril’s comments, cited in note 74 above. For a discussion of the importance of framing devices to the rhetoric of appropriation and supersession deployed in the frontispieces of several other ‘royal’ exemplars of the Bible historiale see Hamburger, “Medieval Work of Art,” 386–88, et passim. 76. In a series of illuminating studies Serge Lusignan has analyzed the development of the French vernacular as a grammatically coherent and linguistically authoritative vehicle for intellectual communication: Serge Lusignan, La langue des rois au Moyen Age: Le français en France et en Angleterre, Le noeud gordien (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2004); idem, “Langue française et société du XIIIe au XVe siècle,” in Nouvelle histoire de la langue francaise, ed. Jacques Chaurand (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1999), 91–143; idem, Parler vulgairement: Les intellectuels et la langue française au XIIIe et XIVe siècles, ed. Pierre Boglioni, 2nd ed., Études médiévales (Montréal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1987). Claire Richter Sherman has also explored the importance of the translatio studii theme, with particular attention to its resonance for Charles V and his circle: Sherman, Imaging Aristotle, 9–11, et passim. 77. For a magisterial statement on the subject of the translatio studii, see Étienne Gilson, “Humanisme médiéval et Renaissance,” in Les Idées et les lettres, Essais d’Art et de Philosophie (Paris: Libraire Philosophique J. Vrin, 1932), 171–96. 78. Adriaan G. Jongkees, “Translatio Studii: Les avatars d’un thème médiéval,” in Miscellanea Mediaevalia in Memoriam Jan Frederik Niermeyer, ed. Jan Frederik Niermeyer (Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 1967), 41–51. 79. “. . . Alcuinus, scientia vitaque praeclarus, quia sapientiae studium de Roma Parisios transtulit, quod illuc quondam a Graecia translatum fuerat a Romanis.” (translation mine.) Speculum historiale, Bk. 23, Cap. 173. We lack a critical edition of the Speculum historiale; I consulted the 1624 edition: Vincent of Beauvais, Bibliotheca Mundi seu Speculi Maioris Vincentii Burgundi Praesulis Bellovacensis, Ordinis Praedicatorum, Theologi ac Doctoris Eximii, Tomus Quartus, Qui Speculum Historiale Inscribitur. . . . Opera & studio Theologorum Benedictinorum Collegij Vedastini in Alma Academia Duacensi (Ex Officina Typographica Baltazaris Belleri, 1624 [cited 2006]); also available from BnF/Gallica at http://visualiseur.bnf.fr/Visualiseur?Destination=Gallica&O=NUMM-81676. Passage cited, with variant text, in: Jongkees, “Translatio Studii,” 45. 80. Lusignan, Parler vulgairement, 15–47. 81. “La translatio qui unit le latin au grec et à l’hébreu fait que ces trois langues apparaissent non pas comme distinctes, mais comme la manifestation à travers le temps d’une même réalité qui est la parole de Dieu.” Lusignan, Parler vulgairement, 42. 82. On Nicole Oresme, with attention to Charles V’s manuscripts, see Sherman, Imaging Aristotle; Claire Richter Sherman, “Les thèmes humanistes dans le programme de traduction de Charles V: Compilation des textes et illustrations,” in Pratiques de la culture écrite en France au XVe siècle, Actes du Coloque international du CNRS, Paris, 16–18 mai 1992, organisé en l’honneur de Gilbert Ouy par l’unité de recherche “Culture écrite du Moyen Âge tardif,” ed. Monique Ornato and Nicole Pons, Textes et Études du Moyen Âge 2 (Louvain-La-Neuve: Fédération Internationale des Instituts d’Études Médiévales, 1995), 527–37; idem, “A Second Instruction to the Reader from Nicole Oresme, Translator of Aristotle’s Politics and Economics,” Art Bulletin 61 (1979): 468–69; idem, “Some Visual Definitions in the Illustrations of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics in the French Translations of Nicole Oresme,” Art Bulletin 59 (1977): 320–30. For Nicole Oresme as a translator, see Susan M. Babbitt, Oresme’s Livre de Politiques and the France of Charles V, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 75, pt. 1 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1985); Serge Lusignan, “Le Latin était la langue maternelle des Romains: La fortune d’un argument à la fin du moyen age,” in Préludes à la Renaissance: Aspects de la vie intellectuelle en France au XVe siècle, ed. Carla Bozzolo and Ezio Ornato (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1992), 265–82; idem, “Lire, indexer et gloser: Nicole Oresme et la ‘Politique’ d’Aristote,” in L’Écrit dans la société médiévale: Divers aspects de sa pratique du XIe au XVe siècle: Textes en hommage à Lucie Fossier, ed. Caroline Faire translater, faire historier 133 Bourlet and Annie Dufour (Paris: C.N.R.S., 1991), 167–81; Lusignan, Parler vulgairement, 154–66; Jeannine Quillet, “Nicole Oresme et le Français médiéval,” in Figures de l’Écrivain au Moyen Âge, Actes du Colloque du Centre d’Études Médiévales de l’Université de Picardie, Amiens 18–20 mars 1988, ed. Danielle Bushinger, Göppinger Arbeiten zur Germanistik 510 (Göppingen: Kümmerle Verlag, 1991): 235–43. 83. Discussing French fourteenth-century vernacular translation as an appropriation of Latinate sapiential and cultural auctoritas and grammatical coherence, Serge Lusignan emphasizes Oresme’s exceptional contribution: “Si tous les traducteurs contestent par leur geste ces idées, un seul à notre avis relance le débat au niveau d’une philosophie de la culture et c’est Nicole Oresme.” [“If all the translators contest these ideas,” of Latin’s hegemonic authority and grammatical rationality, “through their work, in our opinion, Nicole Oresme alone took up the debate and shifted it to the level of a cultural philosophy,” (my translation): Lusignan, Parler vulgairement, 140–41. 84. For discussions of the honorific rex christianissimus/roi très chrètien and of French royalist ideology and rhetoric, see Beaune, Birth of an Ideology, 172–93; Marc Bloch, Les Rois thaumaturges: Étude sur le caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale particulièrement en France et en Angleterre, Nouvelle ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 51–79, 185–258; Anne D. Hedeman, “Les Perceptions de l’image royale à travers les miniatures: L’exemple des Grandes Chroniques de France,” in Pratiques de la culture écrite en France au XV e siècle, ed. Monique Ornato and Nicole Pons, 539–49; Jacques Krynen, Idéal du prince et pouvoir royal en France à la fin du Moyen Age, 1380 –1440: Étude de la littérature politique du temps (Paris: Éditions A. et J. Picard, 1981), 207–33; idem, L’Empire du roi: Idées et croyances politiques en France, XIII e–XV e siècle, Bibliothèque des histoires (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 345–76; Andrew W. Lewis, Royal succession in Capetian France: Studies on Familial Order and the State, Harvard Historical Studies 100 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 104–54; Joseph Reese Strayer, “France: The Holy Land, the Chosen People, and the Most Christian King,” in Medieval Statecraft and the Perspectives of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 304–6. 85. Beaune, Birth of an Ideology, 304–13. 86. Ibid., 176. 87. Ibid., 177–81. 88. Ibid., 176. For Guillaume de Sauqueville see Krynen, L’Empire du roi, 300, 312, 315; Jean Leclerq, “Un sermon prononcé pendant la guerre de Flandre sous Phillippe le Bel,” Revue du Moyen Âge latin, vol. 1 (1945), 165–72; Strayer, “France: The Holy Land,” 311–12. Guillaume de Sauqueville’s sermons are preserved in BnF, lat. 16495 (as noted in Krynen, L’Empire du roi, 495 n. 164.) 89. “Rex glorie . . . in huius orbis orbita diversa regna constituit, diversorum populorum regimina secundum divisiones linguarum et gentium stabilivit, inter quos, sicut israeliticus populus . . . sic regnum Francie in peculiarem populum electum a Domino in executione mandatorum celestium specialis honoris et gratie titulis insignitur. . . .” Cited and translated in Strayer, “France: The Holy Land,” 312–13. 90. Beaune, Birth of an Ideology, 175. 91. Ibid., 180. 92. Gilbert Ouy, “Humanism and Nationalism in France at the Turn of the Fifteenth Century,” in The Birth of Identities: Denmark and Europe in the Middle Ages, ed. Brian Patrick McGuire (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel Publishers, 1996), 110–11. 93. For Charles V’s translators see Delisle, Recherches, 1:82–119. Delisle’s list may be supplemented by that provided in Jacques Monfrin, “Humanisme et traductions au moyen âge,” Journal des Savants (1963): 161–90; idem, “Les traducteurs et leur public en France au moyen âge,” Journal des Savants (1964): 5–20. Both articles are reprinted in Jacques Monfrin, Études de philologie romane, Publications romanes et françaises 230 (Geneva: Librarie Droz S.A., 2001). For a discussion of the work of Evrart de Conty, in particular, see Françoise Guichard-Tesson, “Le métier de traducteur et 134 Aden Kumler de commentateur au XIVe siècle d’après Evrart de Conty,” Le moyen français 24–25 (1989): 131–67. For discussions of Nicole Oresme’s translations see the works cited in note 82 above. 94. Jean le Bon is thought to have entrusted the translation of Scripture to the Dominican Jean de Sy in ca. 1355–56; the illuminated vernacular Bible now called the Bible of Jean de Sy was only completed during the reign of the King’s grandson, Charles VI, in ca. 1380–90. Of the original work, only the Pentateuch survives (BnF, fr. 15397): Berger, La Bible Française, 238–43; François Dupuigrenet Desroussilles, ed., Dieu en son royaume: La Bible dans la France d’autrefois, XIIIe– XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale: Éditions du Cerf, 1991), pp. 14–15, no. 3 (with further bibliography). 95. . . . mais non obstant que bien entendist le latin et que ja ne fust besoing que on lui exposast, de si grant providence fu, pour la grant amour qu’il avoit à ses successeurs, que, au temps à venir, les voult pourveoir d’enseignemens et sciences introduisables à toutes vertus; dont, pour celle cause, fist par solempnelz maistres, souffisans en toutes les sciences et ars, translater de latin en françois tous les plus notables livres, si comme la Bible en .III. manières, c’est assavoir: le texte, et puis le texte et les gloses ensemble, et puis d’une autre manière alégorisée. . . .” (my translation). Christine de Pisan, Le livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V par Christine de Pisan, ed. Suzanne Solente, vol. 2, [Société de l’histoire de France. Publications in octavo] Série antérieure à 1789, 437 (Paris: H. Champion, 1940), 42–43 (pt. 3, cap. 12). Cited in Delisle, Recherches, 1:83. 96. On Christine de Pisan’s construction of Charles V as an exemplary sovereign and sage, see Daisy Delogu, “Reinventing the Ideal Sovereign in Christine de Pizan’s Livre des fais et bonne meurs du sage roy Charles V,” Medievalia et Humanistica, n. s., 31 (2005), 41–58; Eric Hicks, “Excerpts and Originality: Authorial Purpose in the Fais et bonnes meurs,” in Christine de Pizan 2000: Studies on Christine de Pizan in Honour of Angus J. Kennedy, ed. John Campbell and Nadia Margolis, Faux titre 196 (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), 221–31, 331–34; Lori Walters, “Christine de Pizan, Primat, and the ‘noble nation françoise’,” Cahiers de recherches médiévales (XIIIe–XVe s.) 9 (2002): 237–46; idem, “Constructing Reputations: Fama and Memory in Christine de Pizan’s Charles V and L’Advision Cristine,” in Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe, ed. Thelma S. Fenster and Daniel Lord Smail (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 118–42; Lori J. Walters, “The Royal Vernacular: Poet and Patron in Christine de Pizan’s Charles V and the Sept psaumes allégorisés,” in The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval Religious Literature, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Duncan Robertson, and Nancy Bradley Warren, The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 145–82. 97. See, for example, Elizabeth Brown’s re-examination of the evidence for an expulsion of the Jews from France in 1322: Elizabeth A. R. Brown, “Philip V, Charles IV, and the Jews of France: The Alleged Expulsion of 1322,” Speculum 66 (1991): 294–329. 98. On the expulsions of the Jews from France, with further bibliography, see ibid; Noël Coulet, “L’expulsion des Juifs de France,” L’Histoire 139 (1990): 9–16; William C. Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews: From Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians, University of Pennsylvania Press Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), passim; idem, “Jews, Regalian Rights, and the Constitution in Medieval France,” in AJS Review 23 (1998): 12–14, rpt. in Ideology and Royal Power in Medieval France: Kingship, Crusades, and the Jews, Variorum Collected Studies Series CS705 (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001); Roger Kohn, Les juifs de la France du Nord dans la seconde moitié du XIVe siècle, Collection de la Revue des études juives 5 (Louvain: E. Peeters, 1988), vii, 3–43; Isidore Loeb, “Les expulsions des juifs de France au XIVe siècle,” in Jubelschrift zum siebzigsten Geburtstage des Prof. Dr. H. Graetz (Breslau: Druck und Verlag von S. Schottlaender, 1887), 39–56; Sophia Menache, “The King, the Church and the Jews: Some Considerations on the Expulsions from England and France,” Journal of Medieval History 13 (1987): 223–36. 99. Sophia Menache, “Faith, Myth, and Politics: The Stereotype of the Jews and their Expulsion from England and France,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 75 (1985): 371. 100. The exact date and the extent of this repatriation of the Jews remain subjects of some Faire translater, faire historier 135 debate. A royal ordonnance of July 5, 1359, names Robert de Ouverleux as judge and guardian of the Jews, implying that a Jewish return to the kingdom had already begun in 1359. For a discussion of the documentation for the return of the Jews to France in 1359, and the possibility that the return was only effected in 1361, see Roger Kohn, “Les Juifs de la France du Nord à travers les archives du Parlement de Paris (1359?–1394),” Revue des études juives 141 (1982): 17–18; Kohn, Les juifs de la France du Nord, 17–18; Loeb, “Les expulsions des Juifs,” 41–42, 51–52. In 1361, King Jean le Bon returned to France (having been a hostage in England following the French defeat at Poitiers in 1356), and confirmed the return of the Jews previously enacted by the dauphin Charles, acting as regent. For the ordonnance of 1361 and subsequent royal acts concerning the presence of the Jews in France, see Kohn, “Les Juifs,” 18–21; idem, Les juifs de la France du Nord, 18–48. 101. Kohn, Les juifs de la France du Nord, 20–29. 102. On the riots, targeting Parisian Jews, in 1380 and 1382, see Kohn, “Les Juifs,” 52–54; idem, Les juifs de la France du Nord, 183, 185, 259–61. 103. In a recent article that she generously shared with me before its publication, Marcia Kupfer argues for Charles V’s rehabilitation of Hebrew text and Jewish scriptural witness within the framework of his more tolerant policy toward France’s Jewish communities, Marcia Kupfer, “‘. . . lectres . . . plus vrayes’: Hebrew Script and Jewish Witness in the Mandeville Manuscript of Charles V,” Speculum 83 (2008): 58–111. Kupfer persuasively suggests that Charles V was actively engaged in a “project to restore the legitimacy of a Jewish presence grounded in Augustinian principles . . .” (109). As Kupfer notes, it seems clear that there were significant pressures on the King to revert to established monarchial traditions of intolerance. A royal mandement of February 8, 1368 (n.s.), addressed to the bailiff of Caux would seem to refer to a previous order for the expulsion of the Jews. The 1368 mandement was never executed, but it does attest to the tenuous character of Charles V’s policy of toleration, and perhaps signals a strengthening opposition to a continued Jewish presence in the kingdom. The polemical denigration of Hebrew text and the concomitant valorization of Christian vernacular wisdom articulated in the Houghton Bible historiale may have been but another pressure brought to bear on Charles V’s stance vis à vis his Jewish subjects. For the 1368 mandement, with further discussion, see Kohn, Les juifs de la France du Nord, 34–35; Loeb, “Les expulsions des Juifs,” 52–53. The text of the 1368 mandement is given in Léopold Delisle, Mandements et actes divers de Charles V (1364–1380) recueillis dans les collections de la Bibliothèque nationale (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1874), 216, no. 430. 104. Insufficient attention has been paid to the intersection of these two polemical traditions: namely, anti-Judaic and politically expedient constructions of Valois France as a ‘new Israel’ and the translatio studii topoi marshaled in support of Charles V’s translation program. I would suggest that these two discourses are mutually informing and I plan to revisit this issue in a study of the place of theology and spirituality in visual constructions of identity and authority during Charles V’s reign. 105. Jeffrey Hamburger explores the telling juxtaposition of Moses and Charles V in the frontispiece to Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 5212, another Bible historiale owned by Charles V. As Hamburger discusses, the Arsenal manuscript’s frontispiece certainly promotes Charles V’s vision of the Divinity as surpassing that enjoyed by Moses: Hamburger, “Medieval Work of Art,” 398–99.