Jeanette Patterson’s Making the Bible French offers a new approach to studying the Bible historiale, a French translation of the Vulgate made between 1291 and 1295 by the priest and canon Guyart des Moulins. Patterson steps away from a long tradition of inquiry into the Bible historiale that reaches back to the nineteenth-century French scholar Samuel Berger, who sought to untangle the complicated history of the text from a large and diverse corpus of extant manuscripts. Patterson deftly summarizes the development of the Bible historiale as deduced by Berger, Clive Sneddon, and others, but her interests center upon questions of authorial intention and reader reception that have driven scholarship in recent decades. Her approach is anchored in a concept of translation that moves beyond narrow lexical and grammatical investigations of how Latin was rendered into French. Instead, she focuses upon the cultural and historical translation performed in the Bible historiale to make the biblical past both comprehensible and responsive to the interests of medieval lay readers. Consequently, scholars of the medieval Bible and translation will want to pick up this excellent book, but those who research medieval literature and art, lay spirituality, and the pastoral mission of the Latin Church will also find value in Making the Bible French.
The rationale for Patterson’s approach resides in the construction of subject positions within the text of the Bible historiale itself: the translator-narrator speaks explicitly in the text as “I who translated” (je qui translatay) and addresses “you who read” (vous qui lisez) (31-2). Although the textual persona of “I” intersects with Guyart the historical person, it more broadly embodies the pastoral authority of a cleric guiding a layperson’s study of scripture, and thus overlaps with adjacent clerical roles such as preacher or spiritual advisor. This clerical voice is joined by other mediating authoritative voices, notably that of Peter Comestor, whose Historia Scholastica Guyart excerpted, translated, and then inserted throughout his French Bible as histoires that provide a gloss of the sacred text. Rather than focusing on recovering Guyart as translator-author, however, Patterson concentrates on the construction of the lay reader--vous qui lisez--whom these textual voices address. By examining the translation choices made in the Bible historiale, as well as the reception and transformations of the text over its long history, Patterson reveals a compelling portrait of a pious, educated lay reader rendered from a primarily clerical perspective.
Chapter One lays the groundwork by examining the historiography of medieval biblical vernacular translation and summarizing the complex history of theBible historiale. The sprawling diversity of medieval vernacular versions of the Bible from the twelfth century onward exposes the erroneous assumption that vernacular translation was censored by the Church to combat heresy. The notion of a censorial western medieval Church instead reflects polemical Protestant views and Counter-Reformation attempts to regulate translation more tightly. In reality the medieval Church pursued a more pragmatic approach that recognized lay desires for vernacular biblical texts, while balancing catechistic and pastoral aims with efforts to curb heresy in particular circumstances.
The second chapter examines how horizons of expectations among elite lay readers shaped French Bible translation. The chapter title characterizes this process as “confronting reader resistance,” but the issue is not active or passive opposition to biblical translation. Instead, Patterson considers how successful biblical translation entailed bridging gaps in historical understanding between ancient events and the medieval present, meeting medieval readers’ expectations about narrative structure and characterization, as well as connecting to familiar genres such as epic and romance. Patterson describes two basic approaches to meeting these contextual demands of translation. On the one hand, prose translations generally aimed for a more literal translation of the biblical text and then relied upon glosses, prologues, and other supplementary materials to help readers interpret and situate the text within the scope of their knowledge. Verse translations such as Herman de Valenciennes’s Romanz de Dieu et de sa mere, on the other hand, took more liberty with the Latin text both to meet the strictures of meter and rhyme, and to imbue the text with suitable drama and insight into characters’ interiority. The Bible historiale, Patterson argues, followed a middle path between these alternatives. Guyart used prologues and commentaries to guide readers’ understanding, but also moved beyond a more literal translation of the Latin by adding details, clarifications, and subtle changes to make the French text align more with readers’ expectations. Patterson effectively demonstrates the intermediate character of Guyart’s approach to translation by comparing his version of the sacrifice of Isaac to the versions in Jerome’s Vulgate and Jehan Malkaraume’s translation of the Bible into French verse in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century. Yet Guyart could also intervene more assertively in some cases to meet reader expectations, as he did when he drastically rearranged the Vulgate Book of Esther to create a far smoother narrative that would accord better with literary conventions of epic and romance.
Chapter Three considers the contours of truth in the Bible historiale through five apocryphal stories: a life of Julian the Apostate, a story of Adam and Seth, a tale of the True Cross, a life of Pontius Pilate, and a life of Judas. The stories of Julian, Pilate, and Judas furnish instructive anti-models for the reader to contrast with the lives of Christ and the Apostles, while the other two stories trace sacred history through the material history of the wood of the True Cross. How may we reconcile the inclusion of these histoires apocrifs with Guyart’s claim that his book contains “nothing but pure truth” (fors pure verité)? Patterson addresses this seeming contradiction by carefully distinguishing different types of truth at work in the Bible historiale. The most evident measure of truth would be the extent to which biblical narratives recount actual historical events. Another layer of truthfulness resides in the accuracy of Guyart’s translation, which he certifies by openly discussing some of his translation choices. Finally, Patterson posits a “truthfulness of purpose,” embodied by the apocryphal stories. Although the truth value of these stories in the first sense is open to doubt, as Guyart himself points out, the histoires apocrifs manifest tropological and anagogical truths for their readers. The potential benefit of cultivating true belief outweighs hesitations surrounding the possible fictional status of the apocryphal stories; contemporary preachers, Patterson notes, often made similar calculations when selecting exempla for their sermons. A significant corollary of this nuanced view of truth is the agency accorded to readers in making judgments when confronted with doubt. To be sure there were many dogmas for the laity to accept without question, but these examples of apocrypha from the Bible historiale suggest that, far from being thralls to truths dictated by the Church, lay readers were also expected to exercise discernment in some instances.
The fourth chapter suggests a different view of lay readers as ill-equipped for the challenges of reading the biblical text. Guyart heavily abbreviated his version of the Book of Job by translating only the beginning, where God allows Satan to test Job, and the ending, where Job’s fortunes are restored. Guyart omitted everything in between--the bulk of the biblical book--in which Job asks trying questions about faith, justice, and God’s benevolence. Guyart justifies excluding the core of the Book of Job on the grounds that laypeople would misapprehend the text and be led astray by the difficult questions. Instead, by translating only the frame story, Guyart transforms Job into a model of saintly patience, whose unquestioning endurance of misfortune’s slings and arrows ensures God’s blessing in the end. By around 1320, Guyart’s translation of Job was supplemented by a complete French version from theBible du XIIIe siècle, a French translation of the Vulgate from the mid-thirteenth century. Guyart’s significantly abridged translation came to be known as the “Petit Job,” and the full text from the earlier French translation as the “Grand Job.” Surprisingly, the majority of Bible historiale manuscripts contain both versions of the text. Patterson reasons that retaining the “Petit Job” served both less sophisticated lay readers, through Guyart’s radical simplification of the text, as well as more astute readers, for whom the “Petit Job” could serve as a commentary to guide their understanding of the full text in the “Grand Job.” Further evidence for this latter mode of reading comes from the rubrics and glosses added to two copies of the Bible historiale that impose on the “Grand Job” interpretations, largely derived from Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job, that attempt to foreclose uncertainty and potentially hazardous speculation.
Patterson’s book culminates with a final chapter on the “patient reader” as the ideal lay reader envisioned for the Bible historiale. To define this model reader, Patterson compares two French vernacular Bible traditions that intersect in an early fifteenth-century manuscript now in Ghent (Universiteitsbibliotheek 141). The manuscript consists primarily of a series of translated biblical excerpts, each provided with a tropological gloss, that can be traced back to a group of magnificent illuminated manuscripts produced in the milieu of the French royal court during the first third of the thirteenth century. The scribe of the later Ghent manuscript terms this text a Bible moralisée, which is the first instance of a term that is now generally used to describe this type of book, especially the more famous thirteenth-century luxury versions. Patterson draws attention to the prologue of the book in which the scribe says that this aphoristic approach to comprehending the Bible may suit some readers with limited capacity for understanding or who lack patience. For readers willing and able to delve more deeply and thoroughly, the scribe recommends the Bible historiale. The Ghent Bible moralisée in fact excerpts snippets from an especially expansive two-volume Bible historiale made at most a decade or two earlier (Brussels, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, MS 9001-2). The two manuscripts thus dramatically juxtapose two different approaches to adapting the vernacular Bible to lay readership. The scribe of the Ghent manuscript was fully aware of these differences, which prompts Patterson to suggest that his apparent coinage of the term Bible moralisée drew a deliberate distinction with the Bible historiale. Patterson then discusses the qualities of determination, attentiveness, and restrained curiosity that characterized the ideal patient reader envisioned for the Bible historiale. She further points to how miniatures in Bible historiale manuscripts often depict audiences attending to the elevated discourse of various biblical figures, such as St. Paul, or translators and scholars, especially Jerome, Peter Comestor, and Guyart. Members of the audience in these illustrations typically exhibit responses ranging from rapt attention to napping: a spectrum of engagement that would have encouraged a reader’s self-discipline.
Patterson’s combination of careful reading and a theoretically informed understanding of translation yields rewarding insights into the Bible historiale on vital questions about authorial aims and reader reception. In pursuing these questions, however, Patterson would have strengthened her argument by explaining more thoroughly why she selected certain manuscripts as her focus, and how those manuscripts are representative of the Bible historiale. The key manuscripts discussed in Making the Bible French are summarized in an appendix, but they are not situated within the broader development of theBible historiale in any detail. Perhaps this is at most an inconvenience for the reader, but it may also raise questions about how much one could generalize about the Bible historiale from these specific examples. The dubious histoires apocrifs discussed in chapter three, for instance, appear in only a single manuscript of the Bible historiale from 1411, although they are referenced in tables of contents and glosses in other manuscripts that otherwise lack the text (74). Patterson interprets the histoires apocrifs as indicative of guiding notions of carefully nuanced truth, but the absence of the stories from the majority of Bible historiale manuscripts could suggest that the subtle distinctions of truth were largely rejected. This gap in the argument does not negate Patterson’s conclusions but may lead some readers to qualify or limit them more than necessary. Given that the book evolved from Patterson’s dissertation, one wonders whether the gap was opened through overzealous editorial trimming, as academic presses seek to publish ever more streamlined scholarly books.
Patterson also maintains a tight focus--again perhaps an editorial decision--that largely leaves readers to consider broader implications and connections to adjacent areas of scholarship. The ways in which Patterson shows the Bible historiale navigating between sacred text and epic or romance, to take an example, raise historiographic questions about how theories of genre inform our understanding of medieval texts. Alternatively, the figure of the lay reader that emerges from Patterson’s study prompts comparison with clerical readers, especially those in university settings who would typically learn their Bible with the aid of glosses. Regrettably, the book does not engage with Aden Kumler’s Translating Truth: Ambitious Images and Religious Knowledge in Late Medieval France and England (2011). Patterson does reference Kumler’s article on the Bible historiale manuscript made for Charles V, but Translating Truth offers a far more expansive, sophisticated investigation of questions about sacred text, clerical authority, and lay devotion similar to those Patterson tackles in Making the Bible French.
Despite these caveats, Patterson has written an impressive book that promotes new approaches to studying the Bible historiale and presents broader implications for research in medieval vernacular literature, lay spirituality, and the Church’s pastoral mission. The long history, popular appeal, and lability of the Bible historiale call to mind books of hours, which are characterized by a similar variety and responsiveness to lay religious interests. Not everyone could be a monk or nun, but books of hours made the ideal of monastic prayer life available to the laity in a simplified form. Similarly, Making the Bible French indicates that while not everyone could study theology at university or have a personal spiritual advisor, the Bible historiale put a digest of Bible scholarship and the voice of an advisor--the “I” of the text--in the hands of patient (to quote Patterson) and spiritually ambitious (to quote Kumler) lay readers.