God's compass and 'Vana Curiositas': scientific study in the Old French 'Bible Moralisee.'

For historians of medieval science, a painted depiction of the creative the supreme goodness striding forth, precisely condescending, compass in hand, to create the world, has become a visual cliche, vaguely appropriated from its original manuscript adjoining matter [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. Taken from an early thirteenth-century manuscript that historians of art know as the aged French Bible moralisee (Vienna, ONB 2554)(1) this full-page miniature has appeared prominently at least five times above the course of a decade in important treatments of medieval science.(2) In John Murdoch's Album of Science: Antiquity and the Middle Ages of 1984 this image is described as "taken from a late-thirteenth-century French Bible moralisee," its inspiration is postulated as deriving in part from Plato's Timaeus, and it is used to illustrate "creation, the universe, and its parts."(3) As "the creator, measuring the world with a compass, from a thirteenth-century Bible commentary," we find it serving in 1986 as the frontispiece for Amos Funkenstein's Theology, and the Scientific Imagination.(4) Captioned "God as Architect of the Universe," it appears in David C Lindberg's 1992 textbook The Beginnings of Western Science, at a treatment of Thierry of Chartres's twelfth-century explication of Genesis by dint of means of Platonic cosmogony.(5) This painting reappears upon the front dustcover of Alistair Crombie's mode of expressions of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition, published in 1994(6) A hardly any months before, it embellished the hand-bill announcing a scholarly conference upon science and theology in the medieval Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities of Europe(7)

In each of these instances, this image symbolizes what its borrowers - along with other intellectual historians and historians of science - now consider the fruitful interaction of learned science and religious research in the high and late Middle Ages. still I think we should ask whether this was what the miniature was painted to carry in its original manuscript context(8) An answer to this question should have implications not sole for historians of medieval philosophy and science on the contrary also, more broadly, for medievalists interested in the ways in which the nascent universities of thirteenth-century Europe institutionalized cultural attitudes that conflicted with or quotaed the religious values of the ecclesiastical and royal patrons whose commissions historians of medieval art explore.

The Bibles Moralisees as a Genre

Although historians still disagree concerning the time, place, and intended readers of the first Bibles moralisees, consensus is emerging that the genre's earliest members were created in Paris during the opening three decades of the thirteenth century(9) - that is, during the real years in which a scholarly guild was coalescing among the masters in Paris. As the foundation and chartering of the university signal, this was a time of particularly intense intellectual ferment; and for a certain number of such as those biblical scholars in the "school" of Peter the Chanter, the era appear to beed one of profound spiritual crisis.(10) It is my view that, as a genre the Bibles moralisees were created, affected, smooth motivated, by scholarly clergy who shared the latter Weltanschauung; and that they designed the Bibles moralisees to instruct not other scholars on the other hand royalty, especially the French kings.(11)

Of the surviving manuscript Bibles moralisees, sole four are from the early thirteenth hundred The first two are difficult to date, the one and the other absolutely and relative to each other,(12) on the other hand despite historians' usual treatment of the single that contains this frontispiece as the next to the first of the series, there is profitable evidence for believing it instead the first to have been produced(13) Written about 1208-15 in of advanced age French, the book was prepared perhaps for Philip II Augustus, for his son Louis VIII, or level for Louis's bride, Blanche of Castille, and in any incident is now incomplete. To a certain quantity of extent, this first Bible moralisee serv as a original for the second - also now in Vienna, ONB 1179 - written in Latin and thorough in a single volume, which may have been made for the instruction of Louis VIII.(14) The third and abundant more elaborate member of the genre was assuredly made for (Saint) Louis IX during his minority tinder his mother's rule that is, 1226-34; its three turns by legend a gift from Saint Louis himself to his cousin the bishop of Toledo, remain there (Tesoro, 1-3) minus the last quire (now at the Pierpont Morgan Library, novel York, ms 240).(15) The fourth Bible moralisee was copied in part from Saint Louis's tomes, probably within a decade of its protoplast but historians remain unsure who commissioned and who was the intended recipient of the turns now divided among libraries in London (British Library, ms Harleian 1526-1527) Oxford (Bodleian Library, m Bodl 270b) and Paris (Bibliotheque Nationale, m lat. 11560)(16)

These royal Bibles differed dramatically from the Bibles that scholars used. A leaf from a thirteenth-century Latin Bible with the Glossa ordinaria reveals the arrangement that would persist even into the age of print: the biblical body in enlarged letters, surrounded by the agency of separate glosses (excerpted from patristic and medieval discussions) along with interlinear explications of particular words. Illustration was meager, usually limited to a historiated initial at the beginning of each biblical volume [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED].(17) Like the scholar's commentaryed Bible, which had developed in Paris from the late twelfth [i]or[/i] part of to the other the early thirteenth centuries, the Bible moralisee incorporates what are in consequence glosses on the Bible - in this case, as the name indicates, of the like kind glosses constitute the "moralizing" interpretations of the scholar(s) who compos them. That any body could be expounded to reveal several meanings, single of them a "spiritual" or moral meaning, constituted standard biblical exegesis as accepted through many Christian and Jewish pupils of the Bible from the time of Philo Judaeus above a thousand years before, on the other hand recently revived at Paris around the turn round of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.(18) notwithstanding unlike Glossed Bibles, the four thirteenth-century Bibles moralisees are highly illuminated works and each one must rank among the greatest in quantity expensive books ever produced in medieval Europe All were made from large sheets of high-quality parchment, written and illuminated, moreover, upon only one side of the sheet.(19) There were also expensive materials used for ink and paint, of that kind as the lapis lazuli for the amethystine used in borders, backgrounds, and clothes or, more obviously, the gold leaf for the backgrounds within centurys of medallions as well as in the painted enframement of the visual space and in other ornamental features. small in number patrons other than royalty commanded the resources to bring these volumes into being.(20)