Hidden Treasures: Illuminated Manuscripts from Midwestern Collections | Page 2

From the end of the eighth century, the central French city of Tours was an important ecclesiastical center and pilgrimage destination where the definitive text of the Latin Vulgate was
compiled. The ninth century saw a prolific output of large Latin Bibles written in Caroline
minuscule and often sumptuously decorated. These were disseminated throughout the Carolingian empire to monasteries in France, Germany, and Italy. A fragment of a ninth-century
Bible in this exhibition was sent to the Abbey of Saint Maximin in the German city of Trier
in the Rheinland, where it was cut up by monks in the fifteenth century when the abbey
acquired the new Bible printed by Gutenberg.
The design, format, and decoration of bibles changed dramatically from the large, early medieval lectern bibles to smaller, portable, and densely written volumes that proliferated in Paris
beginning in the thirteenth century. A leaf from a Bible illuminated in Cambrai, the northern
French manuscript center, exemplifies the evolution of the two-column layout in the Gothic
period. While the page margins are relatively wide, the text is written in closely spaced and
heavily abbreviated Gothic script. This page from the Book of Daniel is embellished with a
miniature showing Daniel in the lions’ den aided by the prophet Habakkuk.
The margins of Gothic manuscripts were often populated by hybrid monsters, apes, and other
animals engaged in human activities. In some instances such marginalia offer puns or commentary on the main text; in other cases, as in a leaf from a fourteenth-century Bible, the images
appear to have little relation to the text, but suggest instead the artist’s subversive pleasure in
inverting the expected social mores and the established hierarchy. Thus, in the upper margin of
a page devoted to Chapter Ten of Mark’s Gospel, we see playful and satirical human-animal
hybrid figures of a bishop, whose office required strict chastity, listening intently to the siren
song of a woman with long locks of hair playing a psaltery, and in the lower margin, it appears that a woman is engaged in a kind of mock combat with a better-armed male knight.
The mixture of animal and human parts may allude ultimately to humankind’s lower “animal” nature as a foil f