International Medieval Society, Paris • Société Internationale des Médiévistes, Paris

Symposium 2010 - Traditio

Lay Readers of the Bible Translated into French: A Social History

Margriet Hoogvliet, University of Groningen

Handbooks of Medieval literature usually assume that only the King of France and the high nobility were allowed to read the Bible translated into French. It is true that the Kings of France possessed the most lavish manuscripts of the Bible historiale complétée, and that Kings and Queens of France ordered translations of the Bible and other religious texts into the French vernacular, qualified in a recent article as “the royal vernacular” (Walters 2002). Well-known examples include the famous Bible translated by Jean de Sy, started in 1355-56 by order of Jean II le Bon, and the Bible translation by Raoul de Presles (ca. 1375-1382), ordered by Charles V. For the other end of the social scale, inventories indicate that city dwellers hardly possessed any books, and if they were wealthy enough to acquire books, they did not possess large collections. Nevertheless, the inventories mention surprisingly frequently translations of parts of the Bible, mainly from the New Testament, and this even for the lower parts of society. The surviving manuscripts sometimes contain references to lay owners, too, like MS 821 of BM Toulouse, an anthology of devotional texts, including fragments of the Bible in translation, which has the following ex-libris: “Ce livre est a Pierre Tiger/ Il prie qui le trouvera/ Con lui rende et il paiera/ Ung pot de vin pour abreger/ A la mesure de Pontoise.” In this paper the question of lay readers, other than the high nobility, of the Bible translated into French will be addressed, in order to obtain a more detailed image of the reading culture of the Bible in the towns of late medieval France.