Lampe, G.W.H., ed. The Cambridge History of the Bible. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1969–70, Vol. 2: The West from the Fathers to the Reformation.
Stegmüller, Frederick. Repertorium biblicum medii aevi. 11 vols. Madrid: Matriti, 1940–80.
Smalley, Beryl. The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages. 3rd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1983.
Vernet, André, and Anne-Marie Genevois. La Bible au moyen âge. Paris: CNRS, 1989.
BIBLE MORALISÉE
. Name given to a group of illustrated adaptations of the Bible first composed in Latin in
the 13th century and translated into French in the 14th. The text consists of quotations
from the Old and New Testaments that do not flow continuously. These are accompanied
by commentary in the form of allegorical interpretations or moral applications of the
biblical text and illustrated by some 5,000 miniatures. The Bible moralisée is to be
distinguished from the Bible historiale figurée, a 14th-century compilation of similar
nature but composed of different texts and commentaries.
Maureen B.M.Boulton
Berger, Samuel. La Bible française au moyen âge: étude sur les plus anciennes versions de la Bible
écrites en langue d’oïl. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1884.
Delisle, Léopold. “Livres d’images destinées a l’instruction religieuse et aux exercices de piété des
laïques.” Histoire littéraire de la France 31(1893):213–85, esp. 218–46.
Laborde, Alexandre de. La Bible moralisée, conservée a Oxford, Paris et Londres: reproduction
integrale du manuscrit du XIIIe siècle. 5 vols. Paris: Société de Reproductions de Manuscrits a
Peintures, 1911–27.
BIBLICAL TRANSLATION
. Exact translations of biblical texts were rare in Old French. Prepared for a lay audience,
many “translations” were actually adaptations or paraphrases or included extensive
commentaries. Still others drew on noncanonical sources, especially the apocryphal texts
dealing with the life of the Virgin and the childhood of Jesus.
Translations of the Bible into French appeared first in England in the 12th century.
The so-called “Psalters” of Cambridge and Oxford were produced in prose before 1200
and perhaps before 1150. The former, based on the Hebrew Psalter, is really a gloss on
the Latin text, while the latter, based on the Gallican Psalter, is a continuous translation.
Verse translations—the Sauter en fraunceys and Sanson de Nanteuil’s Proverbes de
Salomon—appeared in England in the second half of the century. These were followed in
the latter 12th century by prose versions of the Books of Kings and the Apocalypse. The
Quatre livres des rois is much less literal than the Psalters; it includes continuous
commentary on the text but is of particular importance for the force and elegance of its
The Encyclopedia 241