Making the Bible French: The ‘Bible historiale’ and the Medieval Lay Reader. By Jeanette L. Patterson

Abstract

In this impressive analysis of the thirteenth-century Bible historiale, Jeanette L. Patterson blends a detailed history of the text’s manuscript tradition with a sharp enquiry into the intellectual priorities that animated its translation into French by Guyart des Moulins as well as subsequent expanded versions produced in later centuries. It is argued that Guyart des Moulins, his successors, and the lay public for whom they wrote shared literary expectations that were determined by a range of historical factors: the waning importance of the Latin Crusader states; the emerging popularity of reading among the laity; and specific understandings of literature’s capacity to convey truth in biblical texts as well as in secular poetry and prose. On this last score, Patterson maintains that the author and his lay readers commonly evaluated the truth of a text by the spiritual edification that the written work produced in the reader. Such an approach to literary truth did not oppose truth and fiction, thereby allowing even the more fantastical stories of the Bible to advance the sanctification of laypeople without compromising exacting standards of credibility. In one especially compelling illustration, Patterson describes how two different versions of the Book of Job (one complete, one highly redacted) were juxtaposed in certain copies of the Bible historiale. By combining the more theologically conservative redaction with the unabridged text, the French translator gave lay readers the power to discern which version of Job they were spiritually equipped to read. Thus, Patterson helpfully uncovers how Guyart des Moulins’s Bible did not simply embody a clerical conservatism but actively empowered the laity through specific redaction and translation strategies. By interpreting the Bible historiale in this way, Patterson identifies a culture of biblical translation and reader reception that valued transformative reader responses above overly literal translation, historical facticity, or the imperatives of ecclesiastical control. The success of these arguments should make this book of interest not just within a range of disciplines in medieval studies but also in hermeneutics and literary theory. In fact, one of the most compelling aspects of Patterson’s argumentative approach is the way that she identifies the latent origins of hermeneutical thinking in the medieval translation practices studied here. We come to learn that Guyart des Moulins and his heirs were not simply rendering sacred text from Latin into the vernacular; they were engaged with the biblical text in playful, nuanced, and even daring ways that prioritized reader response as the engine of translation. Patterson’s project also offers a crucial anglophone counterpart to a growing investment in the study of medieval French Bibles within francophone scholarship, evident in the recent collection Écrire la Bible en français au Moyen Âge et à la Renaissance (ed. by Véronique Ferrer and Jean-René Valette (Geneva: Droz, 2016)). Given Patterson’s thorough philology and insightful analysis, one hopes her book will occasion new interactions between francophone and anglophone discussions of vernacular biblical translations and their relation to medieval secular literatures.