As part of the ‘Perspectives from the MFO’ Lecture Series

Antoine Destemberg (MFO)

The collection of manuscripts produced between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, known as the Bibles moralisées, has long suffered from an ambiguous treatment by historians. While they have attracted considerable interest from art historians due to the abundance of illuminations they contain, they have rarely drawn the attention of specialists in medieval exegesis. Written for a lay readership—princely or royal in nature—the biblical commentaries they contain cannot claim to have the intellectual sophistication of the commentaries produced at the same time in the schools of theology, particularly those of Paris. Rather than aiming for originality, these manuscripts seek to offer a form of popularisation of a dual exegesis, both visual and textual, in which the glosses are often reduced to blunt equations, a series of homologies designed to establish an immediate link between a biblical figure and its historical counterpart. In so doing, a “wide social spectrum” (G. Guest) unfolds before the reader’s eyes, in which social categories and groups are analogically associated with non-human subjects (natural elements, animals, plants, or objects) whose moral characteristics they are supposed to share. By manifesting their desire to order their world according to a biblical framework, the medieval theologians thus deployed a classificatory form of social thought, using a logic that anthropologists might not hesitate to describe as totemic.