Mirrored images: the Passion and the First Crusade in a fourteenth-century Parisian illuminated manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 352)

Abstract

This lavish mid-fourteenth-century Parisian illuminated manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 352) combines a description of the Holy Land with an abridged version of the history and continuations of William of Tyre in Old French known as the Eracles. It is both visually familiar to scholars and under-studied. Several of its Gothic panel miniatures, especially folio 62r, the conquest of Jerusalem, have been published more than once, yet the manuscript's illumination programme as a whole has not been assessed since Jaroslav Folda's 1968 doctoral dissertation. Analysis of folio 62r in the context of both the full illumination programme and the manuscript's historical setting reveals that MS fr. 352 speaks to the desire of mid-fourteenth-century French nobility to see the chivalric present mirrored by the crusading past, the new Western ‘holy land’ of Paris mirrored by the true locus sanctus of Jerusalem, and the Passion mirrored by the First Crusade.