The Bible Moralisée and the Picture Bibles of Capetian France

The Bible moralisée, or moralised Bible, is a type of illustrated Bible created in Paris in the first half of the thirteenth century, in the circle of the Capetian kings of France. In its pages, short passages of the biblical text are each accompanied by a painted scene, and each scene is paired with a second picture and text that explain its moral, allegorical or spiritual meaning. The pictures are set in roundels, arranged in two columns of four on each page, so that a single page presents four biblical episodes and four interpretations. The most complete copies contain several thousand of these roundels and are among the most ambitious works of book painting ever undertaken. They were made for members of the French royal house, and they offer an extraordinary view of the way in which the Bible was read, taught and visualised at the court of Blanche of Castile and Louis IX. They also belong to a wider family of picture Bibles produced in Capetian France, in which the narratives of scripture were presented primarily through images.¹²³

The Form of the Bible Moralisée

Text and Image

The structure of a Bible moralisée is regular and repetitive. Each page is divided into two columns of pictures, each column containing four roundels, and beside each column runs a narrow strip of text. The texts and pictures are arranged in pairs. The first roundel of each pair illustrates a short passage of the Bible, summarised or paraphrased in the accompanying text, and the second roundel illustrates an interpretation of that passage, also explained in a short text. The interpretation, which the manuscripts call the moralisation, may relate the biblical event to Christ and the Church, to the virtues and vices, to the sacraments, or to the conditions of contemporary society. The reader thus moves down the page from scripture to commentary and back again, in a rhythm that is maintained across hundreds of pages.⁴⁵

The roundels are framed by circles set within a rectangular field, and the spaces between them are filled with ornament. The figures within the roundels are drawn with a fine line and painted in a limited range of colours, among which blue and red predominate, and gold is used for backgrounds and haloes in the most luxurious copies. The style is that of Parisian painting of the early thirteenth century, related to the stained glass of the period, and the circular frames recall the medallions of the windows of Gothic cathedrals, in which biblical stories were also set out in sequences of roundels. The resemblance is not accidental, for the painters of manuscripts and the designers of glass in Paris worked in the same artistic culture and sometimes drew on the same models.⁶⁷⁸

The Texts

The texts of the Bible moralisée are short. The biblical texts are not complete translations or transcriptions, but brief summaries or selections of the passages illustrated, often a single sentence or a few lines. The moralisations are similarly concise, stating the meaning of the scene in a sentence or two. In the earliest copies, the texts are in either Latin or Old French, and the choice of language reflects the intended reader: a Latin text implies a reader trained in the schools, while a French text suggests a lay reader, perhaps a member of the royal family. The texts depend on the commentary tradition of the Paris schools, and their interpretations draw on the glosses and lectures of the theologians who taught there in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.⁹¹⁰¹¹

The relationship between text and image in the Bible moralisée is unusual. In most illustrated Bibles, the text is primary and the pictures are subordinate to it. In the Bible moralisée, by contrast, the pictures dominate the page, and the texts serve as captions or guides to the pictures rather than as a full presentation of the biblical text. The reader of a Bible moralisée does not read the Bible in the ordinary sense, but rather views a sequence of images that present the biblical narrative and its meaning. John Lowden, in his study of the making of the manuscripts, argued that the books were conceived primarily as works of images, and that the texts were composed to accompany pictures rather than the other way round.¹²

The Thirteenth-Century Copies

The Vienna Manuscripts

The two earliest surviving Bibles moralisées are preserved in the Austrian National Library in Vienna, as codices 2554 and 1179. Both were made in Paris around the 1220s, and both contain a selection of biblical passages with their moralisations, though they are less extensive than the later copies. Codex 2554 has texts in Old French and codex 1179 has texts in Latin, and the two manuscripts are closely related in their picture cycles. They are generally dated to the period between about 1215 and 1230, and it has been suggested that they were made for members of the royal family, possibly for Louis VIII, who reigned from 1223 to 1226, or for his wife, Blanche of Castile. The French text of codex 2554 is one of the earliest substantial texts in French connected with the Bible, and it shows that a lay reader of high rank was envisaged.^1314151617

The Vienna manuscripts were studied in facsimile in the twentieth century. A full-size facsimile of codex 2554 was published at Graz in 1973, with a commentary by Reiner Haussherr, and an English edition with commentary by Gerald Guest appeared in 1995. These editions made the pictures accessible to a wider public and stimulated a revival of interest in the Bibles moralisées. Guest’s commentary provided a translation of the French texts and a detailed analysis of the relationship between the pictures and their interpretations.¹⁸¹⁹

The Toledo Bible

The largest and most splendid of the thirteenth-century Bibles moralisées are two great sets of volumes made in Paris in the 1220s and 1230s. One of them, known as the Toledo Bible, is preserved largely in the treasury of the cathedral of Toledo in Spain, in three volumes, and a final group of leaves from the same book is in the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. The manuscript was probably taken to Castile in the thirteenth century, perhaps as a gift from the French royal house to its Castilian relatives; Blanche of Castile was the daughter of Alfonso VIII of Castile, and the two courts maintained close ties. The Toledo Bible contains a very large number of roundels covering the whole of the Bible, and it represents the most complete realisation of the scheme.²⁰²¹²²

The Dedication Leaf

The leaves in the Morgan Library include a celebrated dedication page that has become one of the best-known images of thirteenth-century French art. In the upper part of the page, a queen and a young king are shown enthroned beneath architectural canopies, and in the lower part a cleric dictates or instructs a lay artist, who is shown at work on a page of roundels. The figures are generally identified as Blanche of Castile and her son Louis IX, who came to the throne as a child in 1226 and ruled under his mother’s regency until he came of age. The page indicates that the book was made for the royal family, and it represents in visual form the collaboration between the clergy who devised the interpretations and the artists who executed the pictures. The page has often been reproduced as an image of the medieval illuminator at work, and it is one of the few thirteenth-century pictures to show the division of labour in the making of a book.^23242526

The Oxford, Paris and London Bible

The second of the great thirteenth-century sets is now divided among three libraries: the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris and the British Library in London. The volumes were separated at an early date, and the dispersal of the manuscript between three countries has made it difficult to study as a whole. It is closely related to the Toledo Bible, and the two were made in the same period, with largely the same scheme of pictures and texts. Between 1911 and 1927 Alexandre de Laborde published a reproduction of this manuscript in five volumes, reuniting its parts in print, and his edition long remained the principal means of access to the material. It was through Laborde’s volumes that many scholars of the twentieth century came to know the Bible moralisée.^2728293031

The Scale of the Work

The scale of these two great Bibles is difficult to convey. Each contains several thousand roundels, and their production required the work of many artists over a period of years. Lowden’s study, based on a close examination of the manuscripts, reconstructed the process by which they were made and showed how the work was divided among teams of painters and scribes. The designs were laid out on the page, the roundels drawn and painted, and the texts written in the spaces left for them. The artists worked in Paris, in workshops that were among the first commercial ateliers of book production in the city, and the Bibles moralisées offer some of the richest evidence for the organisation of these workshops in the early thirteenth century. Robert Branner, in his study of Parisian manuscript painting in the reign of Saint Louis, identified the styles of several groups of painters active in the period, and he connected some of them with the Bibles moralisées.³²³³

The Method of Interpretation

The Senses of Scripture

The interpretations in the Bible moralisée reflect the method of reading scripture that prevailed in the schools of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Medieval theologians held that the Bible could be read in several senses: the literal or historical sense, which concerns the events narrated; the allegorical sense, which relates them to Christ and the Church; the moral or tropological sense, which applies them to the conduct of the individual soul; and the anagogical sense, which refers them to the last things and the life to come. The moralisations of the Bible moralisée draw on all of these senses, though the allegorical and moral are most prominent. A scene from the Old Testament may be interpreted as a prefiguration of an event in the life of Christ, as an image of the Church and its sacraments, or as an example of virtue or vice.³⁴³⁵³⁶

The method of typology, in which persons and events of the Old Testament are understood as prefigurations of the New, was ancient, and it had been expressed in art since the early Christian period. In the twelfth century it became the basis of elaborate programmes of images in stained glass, metalwork and manuscript painting, in which Old Testament scenes were set beside their New Testament fulfilments. The Bible moralisée extended this method to the whole of the Bible and combined it with moral interpretation of a more immediate kind. The result is a vast commentary in images, in which almost every episode of scripture is made to speak to the concerns of the Church and of Christian society in the thirteenth century.³⁷³⁸

Contemporary Society in the Roundels

One of the most striking features of the Bible moralisée is the way in which its interpretations depict the society of its time. The moralisations show bishops, monks, friars, students, merchants, kings and knights, and they address contemporary concerns such as the reform of the clergy, the struggle against heresy, the conduct of the crusades, the dangers of usury and the place of the new orders of friars in the Church. The pictures show the world of thirteenth-century Paris in detail, with its buildings, its dress and its occupations, and they provide valuable evidence for the history of the period. They also reflect the outlook of the clergy who devised them, and they present a view of society in which the Church, guided by its clergy and protected by the king, struggles against the forces of evil.³⁹⁴⁰⁴¹

The Image of the Jews

The Bible moralisée also contains a large number of images of Jews, and these have been the subject of extensive study. Sara Lipton, in her book Images of Intolerance, published in 1999, examined the representation of Jews and Judaism in the manuscripts and showed how the moralisations frequently identify Jews with the enemies of Christ, with avarice and usury, and with the rejection of the truth. Jews are often distinguished by their pointed hats and by other conventional signs, and they are depicted in association with heretics, idolaters and other figures of error. Lipton argued that these images reflect the developing hostility toward Jews in France in the thirteenth century, a period that saw the trial and burning of the Talmud in Paris in the early 1240s and the increasing restriction of Jewish life under Louis IX. The Bible moralisée thus documents not only the theology of its makers but also the attitudes that shaped the treatment of the Jewish communities of France.⁴²⁴³⁴⁴

Michael Camille, in his study The Gothic Idol, discussed related images in the Bible moralisée and in other Gothic works, examining the ways in which medieval art represented idolatry and associated it with Jews, Muslims and pagans. These studies have shown that the Bible moralisée is an important source for understanding the role of images in the construction of religious and social identity in the Middle Ages. They have also made clear that the manuscripts, for all their beauty and ingenuity, must be read in the light of the polemical purposes that their interpretations served.⁴⁵⁴⁶

The Pictures

God the Architect

The best-known single image associated with the Bible moralisée is the frontispiece of the Vienna codex 2554, which shows God as the creator of the world. God is depicted bending over a circle, within which the unformed matter of the universe is shown, and he holds in his hand a pair of compasses, with which he measures out the creation. The image draws on the words of the Book of Proverbs, in which Wisdom describes how God set a compass upon the face of the deep, and on the medieval conception of God as the architect of the universe, who created all things in measure, number and weight. The picture has been reproduced countless times as an emblem of the medieval view of the cosmos and of the relationship between geometry and creation. It also reflects the importance of the architect in the culture of the age of the Gothic cathedrals, for the compasses were the characteristic instrument of the master mason.⁴⁷⁴⁸⁴⁹

Genesis and the Patriarchs

The narrative pictures of the Bible moralisée follow the order of the biblical books. In the Book of Genesis, the creation, the fall of Adam and Eve, the story of Cain and Abel, the flood and the lives of the patriarchs are presented in a long sequence of roundels, each paired with its interpretation. The fall of Adam and Eve, for example, may be interpreted as an image of the soul seduced by worldly pleasure, and the sacrifice of Isaac as a prefiguration of the crucifixion. The story of Joseph, sold by his brothers and raised to power in Egypt, is interpreted in relation to Christ, betrayed and exalted. The pictures of the biblical scenes are clear and economical, showing the principal figures and actions with a minimum of setting, and they are designed to be read quickly and understood at a glance.⁵⁰⁵¹⁵²

Kings, Prophets and Gospels

The historical books of the Old Testament, with their accounts of the judges and kings of Israel, provided abundant material for moral and political interpretation. The stories of Saul, David and Solomon were interpreted in relation to the duties of kingship and the relationship between the king and the Church, themes of obvious relevance to the royal patrons of the books. The prophets were presented as witnesses to Christ, and their visions were interpreted in relation to the Church and the last judgement. In the most complete copies, the New Testament is also included, with the Gospels, the Acts and the Apocalypse, and the Apocalypse in particular was interpreted at length, in a sequence of images that relates the visions of John to the history and future of the Church.⁵³⁵⁴

The Capetian Setting

Paris in the Thirteenth Century

The Bible moralisée was a product of Paris at a time when the city was becoming the intellectual and artistic capital of Europe. Under the Capetian kings, and especially under Philip Augustus, who reigned from 1180 to 1223, Paris grew rapidly in size and wealth. The cathedral of Notre-Dame was under construction, the University of Paris was emerging as the leading centre of theological study in Christendom, and the royal court was establishing itself in the city. The schools of Paris produced the commentaries, sermons and treatises on which the interpretations of the Bible moralisée depend, and the workshops of the city produced manuscripts for the court, the clergy and the students. The Bible moralisée brought together these elements in a work that was at once theological, artistic and royal.^55565758

The study of the Bible at Paris in this period was transformed by the work of masters such as Peter Lombard, Peter Comestor and Stephen Langton. Peter Lombard’s commentaries on the Psalms and the Pauline epistles and his Sentences became standard texts of the schools, while Peter Comestor’s Historia scholastica provided a narrative of biblical history for students. Stephen Langton, who taught at Paris before becoming Archbishop of Canterbury in 1207, is credited with the division of the Bible into the chapters that are still in use. His chapter divisions were adopted in the small, portable Bibles that were produced in Paris in large numbers from the 1230s onward, and these Paris Bibles established a standard order of books and a standard system of reference for the Latin Bible.^59606162

The Bible moralisée belongs to the same world as the Paris Bible but represents a different conception of the biblical book. The Paris Bible was a complete text in a small format, written in a minute script, designed for study and preaching; the Bible moralisée was a vast work of images with only short extracts of the text, designed for contemplation and instruction at the highest level of society. The two forms of book reflect different uses of the Bible in the same city, and together they show the range of ways in which scripture was presented in the early thirteenth century.⁶³⁶⁴

Royal Piety

The patronage of the Bibles moralisées by the Capetian royal house reflects the piety of the dynasty and its sense of a special relationship with the Church. Blanche of Castile, queen of Louis VIII and regent for her son during his minority, was known for her devotion and for her care for the religious education of her children. Louis IX, who was canonised in 1297, was renowned for his piety, his support of the friars, his crusades and his collection of relics, for which he built the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris in the 1240s to house the Crown of Thorns. The Bible moralisée, with its emphasis on the duties of the Christian ruler and on the defence of the faith, presented to its royal readers an image of kingship in which the king served as the protector of the Church and the instrument of divine justice.⁶⁵⁶⁶⁶⁷

The Picture Bibles of Capetian France

The Morgan Picture Bible

The Bible moralisée was not the only kind of picture Bible produced in Capetian France. Another remarkable example is the manuscript now in the Morgan Library and Museum, known as the Morgan Bible, the Crusader Bible or the Maciejowski Bible after a later owner. It was made in Paris around the middle of the thirteenth century and contains a sequence of full-page paintings illustrating the Old Testament, from the creation to the reign of David, without any accompanying biblical text in its original form. The scenes are painted with vivid detail, and the armies of Israel are shown in the armour and equipment of thirteenth-century knights, so that the battles of the Old Testament appear as contemporary warfare. The manuscript later travelled to Poland and Persia, and inscriptions in Latin, Persian and Judeo-Persian were added in its margins.⁶⁸⁶⁹⁷⁰

Daniel Weiss, in his study Art and Crusade in the Age of Saint Louis, published in 1998, argued that the Morgan Bible was made for Louis IX and that its images reflect the king’s crusading ideals. The emphasis on the wars of Israel, the depiction of the Israelites as crusading knights and the attention to the ideal of sacred kingship suggest a programme designed for a king who saw himself as a successor to the rulers of Israel. Whether or not the manuscript was made for Louis himself, it shows how the narratives of the Old Testament could be presented as a model for the conduct of a Christian king.⁷¹⁷²

The Psalter of Saint Louis

A third work closely associated with the king is the Psalter of Saint Louis, preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Made in Paris around 1260, it contains a sequence of full-page paintings of Old Testament scenes, set within architectural frames modelled on the Gothic architecture of the period, and especially on that of the Sainte-Chapelle. The paintings, each accompanied by a short caption on the facing page, show events from the stories of the patriarchs, Moses, the judges and the early kings. The Psalter combines a devotional text with a picture cycle that serves as a narrative introduction to the history of Israel, and it reflects the same interest in the Old Testament as a model for Christian kingship that is found in the Bible moralisée and the Morgan Bible.⁷³⁷⁴⁷⁵

Earlier Traditions

The picture Bibles of Capetian France had their roots in earlier traditions of biblical illustration. The great Bibles produced at Tours in the ninth century under the Carolingians contained full-page frontispieces with scenes from Genesis, Exodus and the Apocalypse, and they established a tradition of royal patronage of illustrated Bibles in the Frankish realm. The Carolingian rulers, like the Capetians after them, presented themselves as the successors of the kings of Israel and the protectors of the Church, and they commissioned luxurious Bibles as expressions of this ideal. In the twelfth century, the great Romanesque Bibles of England, France and the Empire, written in large format for monastic communities, contained painted initials and occasional full-page pictures. The Bible moralisée transformed these traditions by subordinating the text to the image and by extending the picture cycle to the whole of scripture.⁷⁶⁷⁷

Later Bibles Moralisées

Fourteenth-Century Copies

The Bible moralisée continued to be copied after the thirteenth century, though the later copies are fewer and often less extensive. In the fourteenth century a Bible moralisée was made in Paris for John the Good, who became king of France as John II in 1350 and reigned until 1364; this manuscript, now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, follows the scheme of the thirteenth-century copies but in the style of fourteenth-century Parisian painting. Another copy, made in Naples in the middle of the fourteenth century, reflects the spread of French artistic and dynastic culture to the Angevin kingdom of southern Italy, whose rulers were a branch of the Capetian dynasty. These later copies show that the Bible moralisée remained associated with the French royal family and its branches long after its creation.⁷⁸⁷⁹⁸⁰

The Limbourg Brothers

One of the most famous later Bibles moralisées was begun around 1402 by the Limbourg brothers, the painters from the Netherlands who later created the Très Riches Heures for John, Duke of Berry. The brothers were commissioned by Philip, Duke of Burgundy, the brother of King Charles V, to paint a Bible moralisée, and they worked on it for several years. The manuscript, now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, was left unfinished, but the completed pages show the brothers’ early style, with its delicate modelling, its attention to landscape and its refined colour. Millard Meiss, in his study of French painting in the time of Jean de Berry, discussed this manuscript as an important stage in the development of the Limbourgs’ art. The commission shows that the Bible moralisée retained its prestige among the princes of the French royal house into the fifteenth century.⁸¹⁸²⁸³

Copying and Adaptation

The later copies of the Bible moralisée were often based directly on the thirteenth-century manuscripts, and their makers reproduced the scheme of roundels and texts with varying degrees of fidelity. Lowden showed that the thirteenth-century copies themselves were closely related, and that the makers of each copy had access to the earlier ones or to common models. The transmission of the Bible moralisée was thus a matter of direct copying rather than of independent invention, and the survival of so many related manuscripts allows the process of copying and adaptation to be followed in detail. The changes made in each copy, in the selection of scenes, the wording of the texts and the style of the pictures, reflect the interests of the patrons and the artists of each period.⁸⁴

Makers and Readers

The Clergy and the Artists

The making of a Bible moralisée required the collaboration of theologians, scribes and painters. The theologians selected the biblical passages, composed the moralisations and determined the subjects of the pictures; the painters designed and executed the roundels; and the scribes wrote the texts. The dedication page of the Toledo Bible, with its image of a cleric instructing a lay artist, represents this collaboration, and Lowden’s reconstruction of the making of the books showed how carefully the work was coordinated. The designers must have provided instructions for the painters, describing the scenes to be shown, and in some places such instructions survive in the margins of the manuscripts. The scale of the enterprise suggests that it was organised by a team of clergy working over several years, perhaps attached to the royal chapel or to one of the religious communities of Paris.⁸⁵⁸⁶

The artists of the Bibles moralisées worked in a style that combined clarity with economy. Each roundel had to be legible at a small scale, and the figures are therefore drawn with strong outlines and simple gestures. The compositions are repeated with variations across hundreds of pages, and the painters developed a repertory of figures and settings that could be adapted to many subjects. The kings, bishops, monks and laymen of the moralisations are distinguished by their dress and attributes, and the personifications of virtues and vices by conventional signs. The result is a visual language that the reader could learn to read quickly, moving from one roundel to the next with an understanding of the conventions that governed them.⁸⁷⁸⁸

The Royal Reader

The question of how the Bibles moralisées were used by their royal owners has been much discussed. The books were too large and too costly for everyday use, and they were not designed to be read through from beginning to end in the manner of an ordinary book. They may have been used for instruction, perhaps in the education of the young Louis IX, or for private meditation, or as objects of display that expressed the piety and learning of the royal house. The French texts of codex 2554 suggest a reader who was more comfortable in French than in Latin, while the Latin texts of the other copies suggest a reader with clerical education or a reader assisted by a cleric. The dedication page of the Toledo Bible, which shows the queen and the king above the cleric and the artist, implies that the royal patrons were the intended recipients of the work and that the clergy who devised it were offering it to them as a guide.⁸⁹⁹⁰⁹¹

It is also possible that the Bibles moralisées were intended as gifts. The Toledo Bible was taken to Castile, perhaps as a gift to the Castilian royal family, and it has been suggested that the Bible moralisée was conceived as a kind of royal treasure, a work so magnificent that it could serve as a diplomatic present between dynasties. The great cost of the books, which required vast quantities of parchment, gold and pigment and years of skilled labour, made them comparable to the reliquaries and liturgical objects that the Capetian kings commissioned for their chapels. They belonged to the same culture of royal splendour as the Sainte-Chapelle, in which architecture, glass and metalwork were combined to create a setting worthy of the relics of the Passion.⁹²⁹³⁹⁴

Reading a Page

The Order of Reading

A reader approaching a page of a Bible moralisée encounters a dense but orderly arrangement. The page is read column by column, beginning at the top left. The first roundel shows a biblical scene, and the text beside it summarises the passage; the second roundel, directly below, shows the interpretation, and its text explains the meaning. The third and fourth roundels form a second pair, and so on down the column, after which the reader moves to the top of the second column and continues in the same way. A single page thus contains four pairs, and an opening of two facing pages contains eight. The regularity of the layout allows the reader to move through the book without confusion, and it gives the whole work a rhythm in which the alternation of scripture and interpretation is constantly repeated.⁹⁵⁹⁶

The visual relationship between the two roundels of each pair is often carefully designed. The interpretation frequently repeats the composition of the biblical scene, so that the figures of the interpretation occupy the same positions as those of the scene above, and the eye recognises the correspondence between them. A biblical king may be replaced in the lower roundel by Christ or by a contemporary prince, a sacrifice by the Mass, an enemy of Israel by a heretic or a sinner. This visual parallelism reinforces the interpretive relationship stated in the texts, and it allows the reader to grasp the meaning of the moralisation through the pictures as well as through the words. The technique is one of the most distinctive features of the Bible moralisée and one of the clearest demonstrations of its conception as a work of images.⁹⁷⁹⁸

Colour and Ornament

The colouring of the Bibles moralisées contributes to their legibility and their splendour. In the most luxurious copies, the backgrounds of the roundels are of burnished gold or of deep blue, and the figures are painted in strong reds, blues, greens and whites, with fine black outlines. The spaces between the roundels are filled with patterned grounds, often in blue and red, that recall the mosaic backgrounds of stained-glass windows. The texts are written in a regular Gothic book hand, with coloured initials marking the beginning of each passage. The effect of a whole page is of a jewelled surface, in which the individual scenes are set like gems in a frame. The comparison with the windows of the Sainte-Chapelle, completed in the 1240s, is often made, and it reflects a shared aesthetic of colour, light and order in the Parisian art of the age.^99100101

Scripture and the Schools

The selection of passages in the Bible moralisée reflects the priorities of its designers. Not every verse of the Bible is illustrated, and the designers chose the episodes that lent themselves most readily to moral and allegorical interpretation. Some books are treated at great length, while others are represented by only a few scenes. The texts that accompany the biblical roundels are often close to the wording of the Vulgate, but they condense and sometimes paraphrase it, and the moralisations draw on the commentaries and glosses used in the schools of Paris. The Bible moralisée may therefore be seen as a visual counterpart of the glossed Bibles of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in which the biblical text was surrounded by commentary in the margins and between the lines. In both, scripture is never presented alone but always accompanied by the interpretation of the Church.^102103104

Survival and Dispersal

The survival of the thirteenth-century Bibles moralisées is itself a remarkable chapter in their history. The Vienna manuscripts passed through the hands of several owners before entering the imperial library of the Habsburgs, the predecessor of the Austrian National Library. The Toledo Bible remained in the cathedral treasury of Toledo for centuries, while its final leaves were separated from it and eventually acquired by the Morgan Library in New York. The volumes of the Oxford, Paris and London manuscript were divided at an early date and passed into three different collections, where they remained for centuries without being recognised as parts of a single work. The reconstruction of the original books has depended on the careful comparison of their contents, and Laborde’s reproduction was the first to bring the scattered parts of one Bible moralisée together. The history of the manuscripts thus reflects the changing fortunes of royal and ecclesiastical libraries across Europe from the Middle Ages to the modern period.^105106107108

Modern Study

The Bibles moralisées were known to scholars in the nineteenth century, but their study began in earnest with Laborde’s reproduction of the Oxford, Paris and London manuscript in the early twentieth century. The Vienna facsimiles of 1973 and 1995 made the earliest copies widely accessible, and the publication of Lowden’s two-volume study in 2000 provided the first comprehensive account of the whole group of manuscripts and of the process by which they were made. Lipton’s work on the representation of Jews and Camille’s work on idolatry placed the manuscripts in the context of the social and religious history of the thirteenth century. The digitisation of the manuscripts by the libraries that hold them has made their images available to a global audience, and the Bible moralisée has become one of the most frequently studied works of medieval art.^109110111112

The study of the Bibles moralisées has also contributed to broader questions in the history of medieval art and religion. The manuscripts show how images could function as a form of theological discourse, conveying complex interpretations through visual means. They illustrate the relationship between the schools and the court, between learned commentary and lay piety, and between the Bible and contemporary society. They also raise questions about the role of images in the formation of attitudes toward religious minorities, and about the responsibility of art for the representation of others. In all of these respects, the Bible moralisée is a uniquely rich source for the culture of thirteenth-century France.^113114115

Assessment

The Bible moralisée is one of the most remarkable creations of medieval book painting and one of the most ambitious attempts ever made to present the Bible in images. Created in Paris in the circle of the Capetian court in the early thirteenth century, it paired thousands of biblical scenes with painted interpretations, setting them in roundels that recall the stained glass of the Gothic cathedrals. Its earliest copies, in Vienna, and its largest, in Toledo and in Oxford, Paris and London, were made for members of the royal house, and the dedication page of the Toledo Bible depicts Blanche of Castile and Louis IX as its patrons. Its interpretations draw on the commentaries of the Paris schools and reflect the concerns of the Church in the age of Saint Louis, including its hostility toward Jews. With the Morgan Picture Bible and the Psalter of Saint Louis, it belongs to a group of picture Bibles that show the importance of the Old Testament as a model for Capetian kingship. It continued to be copied for the French royal family and its branches into the fifteenth century, and in modern times it has become a central source for the study of medieval art, theology and society. Its pages remain a vivid witness to the meeting of royal patronage, scholastic learning and artistic invention in the Paris of the Capetian kings, and to the conviction of its makers that every part of scripture could be made to speak, through images, to the life of their own world.^116117118119

Notes

1. John Lowden, The Making of the Bibles Moralisées, 2 vols. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). ↩
2. Gerald B. Guest, Bible Moralisée: Codex Vindobonensis 2554, Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (London: Harvey Miller, 1995). ↩
3. Grokipedia, “Gothic art” ↩
4. John Lowden, The Making of the Bibles Moralisées, 2 vols. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). ↩
5. Gerald B. Guest, Bible Moralisée: Codex Vindobonensis 2554, Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (London: Harvey Miller, 1995). ↩
6. Robert Branner, Manuscript Painting in Paris during the Reign of Saint Louis: A Study of Styles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). ↩
7. Grokipedia, “Sainte-Chapelle” ↩
8. Grokipedia, “Gothic art” ↩
9. John Lowden, The Making of the Bibles Moralisées, 2 vols. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). ↩
10. Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). ↩
11. Grokipedia, “University of Paris” ↩
12. John Lowden, The Making of the Bibles Moralisées, 2 vols. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). ↩
13. John Lowden, The Making of the Bibles Moralisées, 2 vols. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). ↩
14. Gerald B. Guest, Bible Moralisée: Codex Vindobonensis 2554, Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (London: Harvey Miller, 1995). ↩
15. Reiner Haussherr, ed., Bible moralisée: Faksimile-Ausgabe im Originalformat des Codex Vindobonensis 2554 (Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1973). ↩
16. Grokipedia, “Austrian National Library” ↩
17. Grokipedia, “Louis VIII of France” ↩
18. Gerald B. Guest, Bible Moralisée: Codex Vindobonensis 2554, Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (London: Harvey Miller, 1995). ↩
19. Reiner Haussherr, ed., Bible moralisée: Faksimile-Ausgabe im Originalformat des Codex Vindobonensis 2554 (Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1973). ↩
20. John Lowden, The Making of the Bibles Moralisées, 2 vols. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). ↩
21. Grokipedia, “Toledo Cathedral” ↩
22. Grokipedia, “Morgan Library & Museum” ↩
23. John Lowden, The Making of the Bibles Moralisées, 2 vols. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). ↩
24. Grokipedia, “Louis IX of France” ↩
25. Grokipedia, “Blanche of Castile” ↩
26. Grokipedia, “Morgan Library & Museum” ↩
27. John Lowden, The Making of the Bibles Moralisées, 2 vols. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). ↩
28. Alexandre de Laborde, La Bible moralisée illustrée conservée à Oxford, Paris et Londres, 5 vols. (Paris: Société française de reproductions de manuscrits à peintures, 1911–1927). ↩
29. Grokipedia, “Bodleian Library” ↩
30. Grokipedia, “British Library” ↩
31. Grokipedia, “Bibliothèque nationale de France” ↩
32. John Lowden, The Making of the Bibles Moralisées, 2 vols. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). ↩
33. Robert Branner, Manuscript Painting in Paris during the Reign of Saint Louis: A Study of Styles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). ↩
34. Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). ↩
35. Grokipedia, “Typology (theology)” ↩
36. Grokipedia, “Allegory” ↩
37. Grokipedia, “Typology (theology)” ↩
38. Grokipedia, “Gothic art” ↩
39. John Lowden, The Making of the Bibles Moralisées, 2 vols. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). ↩
40. Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisée (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). ↩
41. Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). ↩
42. Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisée (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). ↩
43. Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). ↩
44. Grokipedia, “Louis IX of France” ↩
45. Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). ↩
46. Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisée (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). ↩
47. Gerald B. Guest, Bible Moralisée: Codex Vindobonensis 2554, Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (London: Harvey Miller, 1995). ↩
48. Reiner Haussherr, ed., Bible moralisée: Faksimile-Ausgabe im Originalformat des Codex Vindobonensis 2554 (Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1973). ↩
49. Grokipedia, “Gothic art” ↩
50. John Lowden, The Making of the Bibles Moralisées, 2 vols. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). ↩
51. Gerald B. Guest, Bible Moralisée: Codex Vindobonensis 2554, Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (London: Harvey Miller, 1995). ↩
52. Grokipedia, “Typology (theology)” ↩
53. John Lowden, The Making of the Bibles Moralisées, 2 vols. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). ↩
54. Alexandre de Laborde, La Bible moralisée illustrée conservée à Oxford, Paris et Londres, 5 vols. (Paris: Société française de reproductions de manuscrits à peintures, 1911–1927). ↩
55. Grokipedia, “Capetian dynasty” ↩
56. Grokipedia, “Notre-Dame de Paris” ↩
57. Grokipedia, “University of Paris” ↩
58. Grokipedia, “Paris” ↩
59. Laura Light, “The Bible and the Individual: The Thirteenth-Century Paris Bible,” in The Practice of the Bible in the Middle Ages, ed. Susan Boynton and Diane J. Reilly (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). ↩
60. Grokipedia, “Stephen Langton” ↩
61. Grokipedia, “Peter Lombard” ↩
62. See also “Chapter and Verse: Langton, Estienne and Isaac Nathan’s Concordance” on this site. ↩
63. Laura Light, “The Bible and the Individual: The Thirteenth-Century Paris Bible,” in The Practice of the Bible in the Middle Ages, ed. Susan Boynton and Diane J. Reilly (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). ↩
64. Christopher de Hamel, The Book: A History of the Bible (London: Phaidon, 2001). ↩
65. Grokipedia, “Louis IX of France” ↩
66. Grokipedia, “Blanche of Castile” ↩
67. Grokipedia, “Sainte-Chapelle” ↩
68. Daniel H. Weiss, Art and Crusade in the Age of Saint Louis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). ↩
69. Grokipedia, “Morgan Library & Museum” ↩
70. Grokipedia, “Morgan Bible” ↩
71. Daniel H. Weiss, Art and Crusade in the Age of Saint Louis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). ↩
72. Grokipedia, “Louis IX of France” ↩
73. Grokipedia, “Bibliothèque nationale de France” ↩
74. Grokipedia, “Psalter” ↩
75. Grokipedia, “Sainte-Chapelle” ↩
76. See also “The Carolingian Bibles of Alcuin and Theodulf” on this site. ↩
77. Grokipedia, “Illuminated manuscript” ↩
78. John Lowden, The Making of the Bibles Moralisées, 2 vols. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). ↩
79. Grokipedia, “John II of France” ↩
80. Grokipedia, “Capetian dynasty” ↩
81. Millard Meiss, French Painting in the Time of Jean de Berry: The Limbourgs and Their Contemporaries (New York: George Braziller, 1974). ↩
82. Grokipedia, “Limbourg brothers” ↩
83. Grokipedia, “Bibliothèque nationale de France” ↩
84. John Lowden, The Making of the Bibles Moralisées, 2 vols. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). ↩
85. John Lowden, The Making of the Bibles Moralisées, 2 vols. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). ↩
86. Grokipedia, “Morgan Library & Museum” ↩
87. John Lowden, The Making of the Bibles Moralisées, 2 vols. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). ↩
88. Robert Branner, Manuscript Painting in Paris during the Reign of Saint Louis: A Study of Styles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). ↩
89. John Lowden, The Making of the Bibles Moralisées, 2 vols. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). ↩
90. Grokipedia, “Louis IX of France” ↩
91. Grokipedia, “Blanche of Castile” ↩
92. John Lowden, The Making of the Bibles Moralisées, 2 vols. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). ↩
93. Grokipedia, “Sainte-Chapelle” ↩
94. Grokipedia, “Toledo Cathedral” ↩
95. John Lowden, The Making of the Bibles Moralisées, 2 vols. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). ↩
96. Gerald B. Guest, Bible Moralisée: Codex Vindobonensis 2554, Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (London: Harvey Miller, 1995). ↩
97. John Lowden, The Making of the Bibles Moralisées, 2 vols. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). ↩
98. Grokipedia, “Typology (theology)” ↩
99. Robert Branner, Manuscript Painting in Paris during the Reign of Saint Louis: A Study of Styles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). ↩
100. Grokipedia, “Sainte-Chapelle” ↩
101. Grokipedia, “Gothic art” ↩
102. Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). ↩
103. Grokipedia, “Vulgate” ↩
104. Grokipedia, “Peter Lombard” ↩
105. John Lowden, The Making of the Bibles Moralisées, 2 vols. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). ↩
106. Alexandre de Laborde, La Bible moralisée illustrée conservée à Oxford, Paris et Londres, 5 vols. (Paris: Société française de reproductions de manuscrits à peintures, 1911–1927). ↩
107. Grokipedia, “Austrian National Library” ↩
108. Grokipedia, “Morgan Library & Museum” ↩
109. John Lowden, The Making of the Bibles Moralisées, 2 vols. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). ↩
110. Alexandre de Laborde, La Bible moralisée illustrée conservée à Oxford, Paris et Londres, 5 vols. (Paris: Société française de reproductions de manuscrits à peintures, 1911–1927). ↩
111. Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisée (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). ↩
112. Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). ↩
113. Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisée (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). ↩
114. Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). ↩
115. Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). ↩
116. John Lowden, The Making of the Bibles Moralisées, 2 vols. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). ↩
117. Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisée (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). ↩
118. Daniel H. Weiss, Art and Crusade in the Age of Saint Louis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). ↩
119. Grokipedia, “Louis IX of France” ↩