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From the end of the thirteenth century to the first decades of the sixteenth century, Guyart des Moulins’s Bible historiale was the predominant French translation of the Bible. Enhancing his translation with techniques borrowed from scholastic study, vernacular preaching, and secular fiction, Guyart produced one of the most popular, most widely copied French-language texts of the later Middle Ages.
Making the Bible French investigates how Guyart’s first-person authorial voice narrates translation choices in terms of anticipated reader reactions and frames the biblical text as an object of dialogue with his readers. It examines the translator’s narrative strategies to aid readers’ visualization of biblical stories, to encourage their identification with its characters, and to practice patient, self-reflexive reading. Finally, it traces how the Bible historiale manuscript tradition adapts and individualizes the Bible for each new intended reader, defying modern print-based and text-centred ideas about the Bible, canonicity, and translation.
Making the Bible French examines the Bible historiale, the most prolific and influential pre-Reformation French-language Bible.
- Imprint: University of Toronto Press
- Published: January 2022
- Pages: 264
Jeanette L. Patterson is an associate professor of French, Medieval Studies, and Translation Studies at Binghamton University.
"Making the Bible French should be essential reading for all medievalists and those interested in the place of the Bible in vernacular literary culture. It is an unusually ambitious, intellectually exciting, and compulsively readable book that promises to restore scriptural translation and devotional literature to the place of prominence they deserve in the field."
Noah Guynn, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of California, Davis
"Making the Bible French is a study of the strategies that made Guyart des Moulins’s Bible historiale the most popular translation of the Bible in the French Middle Ages."
Jeanette Beer, Professor Emerita, Purdue University and senior member, Lady Margaret Hall and St. Hilda’s College, University of Oxford
"Patterson’s study of this long-lived thirteenth-century Bible for lay readers reveals its vernacular translation as acculturation, persuasion, occultation, exegesis; as culture shock responsive to 1291’s crusading losses; and as indebted to narrative fiction’s conventions, especially in presenting problematic Bible stories. Smart, scholarly, theoretically alert, this is an exciting book, contributing to religious, literary, and cultural history in north-western and central Europe, and of special value to modern literary study in French, English, Flemish, Dutch, and German."
Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Thomas F.X. and Theresa Mullarkey Chair in Literature (Emerita), Fordham University