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Since its nineteenth-century rediscovery, the Très Riches Heures has been endowed with mythic status, its cultural capital facilitated by serial reproductions. A 2025 exhibition in Chantilly, publicized as a “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity to see the manuscript in person, contributed further to this proliferation of replications and to the book’s attendant aura. One image looms especially large in this procession of fragmentary simulacra: the opening miniature, representing January, which has become a totem for the entire book. Queering this page, by suggesting that (for example) it encodes homoerotic meanings, effectively entails that the Très Riches Heures itself be queered.
Inspired by a 2001 article by Michael Camille on the manuscript’s medieval patron, Jean de Berry—his contribution to a volume on queer collecting—this talk follows Camille in interpreting the January page as containing a Ganymede allusion. Focusing on the implications of representing dogs as witnesses to the youth’s abduction in this context, I also turn in conclusion to another modern effort to queer an icon of European premodernity, namely Shakespeare, through the reworking of the January page via one of its countless reproductions. This serves to highlight intersections between queering as an interpretive tactic and wider efforts to subvert cultural icons.
