BIBLE, decorated manuscript

This is a handsome and weighty thirteenth-century most probably English Bible, the format in which most readers of the Middle Ages knew the complete text. Due to its vast size, most Early Medieval Biblical books included only sections of the complete canon, but the needs of students in the fledging university in Paris in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries lead to advancements in the methods of book production in order to mass-produce complete copies for that market. Script became miniaturised and the words themselves heavily abbreviated in an effort to push resources to their limit, and at the same time libraires or master-book producers divided up master-copies to hand out in sections (or pecia) to multiple copyists at once, dramatically increasing the rate of copying. Thus they survived relatively in large numbers. However their multiple decorated initials and fine script often attracted the attentions of the commercial book dispersers from the nineteenth century onwards, and they have become fewer and fewer in the market in the last century, with examples continuing to fetch record prices.

Here the form of the text is mostly that of a more common Parisian Bible, and with the standard abbreviations of Hebrew names in the form “Aaz apprehendens …” at its end. Crucially, however, the script and penwork decoration here appear English and the books of Tobit, Judith and Esther are in the order usually identifying English use. In addition, the early notes on Hebrew at the end of the book strongly indicate an early use in a medieval English scholarly setting (see below).

What is perhaps most notable about this book is the interest of an early user in the Hebrew Bible. Additions to endleaves at the front of the volume suggest a contemporary or near-contemporary use in theological teaching or preaching, perhaps in a cathedral school (see below), but a page of notes added in the decades after the book’s production to blank space before the abbreviations of Hebrew names indicates a more specific use. This begins with the words “Thorath id est lex” with five penlines drawn off to associated lines of text. These text-lines reveal that the scribe was attempting to describe the contents of the Torah – the Hebrew Bible, here described accurately as ‘the law [of Moses]’, and each line opens with a somewhat garbled version of the opening words of the first five books of the Old Testament:

“Bresith” – in fact Bereshit (Genesis, ie. ‘In the beginning’)

“Ellesmoth” – in fact Shemot (Exodus, ie. ‘Names’)

“Vaietra” – in fact Vayikra (Leviticus, ie. ‘And he called’)

“Vagedabar” – in fact Bamidbar (Numbers, ie. ‘In the desert’)

“Addabarim” – in fact Devarim (Deuteronomy, ie. ‘The words’)

These are followed by a section of brief notes on Old Testament prophets and other figures from the Hebrew section of the Bible, as well as an observation on the absence of Baruch “In hebreo canone” (‘in the Hebrew canon’). This section terminates with more usual notes on religious ideals and relative Biblical dates.

Despite Jerome’s and Bede’s insistence on the primacy of Hebrew as a Biblical language for Old Testament texts such as the Psalms (and indeed in some medieval accounts, the original language of all mankind), actual records of northern European interest in the language or its religious texts before the Renaissance are few[1], and astoundingly so from England which had no Jewish population before 1066 and none after Edward I expelled what Hebrew speakers it had in 1290. Indeed a memory of interacting with Jews in religious discussions as a youth and then their subsequent exile some years before the period in which these additions most probably were made might well explain these strange and fascinating additions by the present scribe, as well as their garbling from his slightly faulty memory. As such this volume would appear to bear witness to the impact of the English Jewry on theological thinking and teaching in medieval England, even after the expulsion of 1290.