Found in Translation

Images Visionary and Visceral in the Welles-Ros Bible

Datos Bibliográficos

ID21322286
AutoresKathryn Smith (0000-0002-7521-7875, New York University, autor de correspondencia), Kathryn A Smith (0000-0001-9006-2931)
Año2020
Volumen59
Número2
Páginas91-130
Fecha de publicación2020-09-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaGesta (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0016-920X • E-ISSN: 2169-3099
EditorialUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/710571
OpenAlexW3093303838
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas27

This essay introduces to a wider audience the manuscript that I call the Welles-Ros Bible (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 1), the most complete surviving witness and sole extant illuminated copy of the Anglo-Norman Bible, the earliest full prose vernacular Bible produced in England. I argue that this grand, multilingual manuscript and the vernacular translation preserved in its pages were commissioned in the 1360s by the widowed baroness Maud de Ros to serve as a primer, mirror, guide, family archive, and source of consolation for her son, John, fifth Baron Welles of Welle, Lincolnshire, and other estates. Working under the direction of a Carmelite chaplain, who I believe composed the translation, the two secular artists who illuminated the manuscript strove to visualize scripture in a manner that was at once faithful to the vernacular biblical text in all its concrete detail, evocative of its most elevated themes, and relevant to the values and lived experience of its intended reader-viewer. I show how the Bible’s pictorial and heraldic program reframes Christian salvation history as Welles family history. In addition, using as case studies a selection of illustrations for the Old Testament books, I endeavor to reconstruct the main artist’s creative process, and to identify some of the possible contours of the collaboration that produced the Bible’s visual program. This essay contributes to our picture of lay literate and religious aspiration; the history of Bible translation and reception; women’s cultural patronage; artists’ literacy and working methods; and medieval ideas about gender, sexuality, memory, and the emotions in post-Black Death England

Art · Art history · Consolation · Extant taxon · Linguistics · Literature · Vernacular · Witness · Early Modern Women Writers · History · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity