Caesar’s Commentaries, French
translation by Jean de Chesne, Bruges,
1476. Yale MS 226, fol. 67. Courtesy
of Beinecke Library, Yale University.
create the narrative account. For readers already familiar with the text, it would be
possible to follow the story through the images without actually reading the prose. The
Beinecke manuscript alone contains more than 160 miniatures and historiated initials.
By the mid-14th century, there was a great demand for manuscript books of Latin texts
that had been translated into French. The audience for these volumes comprised primarily
members of the court, aristocrats who could afford elegantly written and illuminated texts
of classical and medieval authors. This genre of French manuscript was generally
produced in folio format on parchment of excellent quality and transcribed in distinctive
styles of Gothic script characterized by a variety of cursive letterforms. Because of the
combination of letterforms from more formal Gothic scripts (as illustrated in Plate 6)
with cursive features derived from the chancery, the spiky styles of French Gothic script
are often termed “bastard” (bâtarde) or “hybrid.”
Among the many Latin texts rendered into French was St. Augustine’s monumental
De civitate Dei. Beinecke 215 (opposite right) contains the complete work in four
volumes, originally bound as two. Produced in a Parisian workshop ca. 1415, it is
illustrative of manuscripts popu lar among the French nobility during the 14th and 15th
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1308