Bookish Regimes of Historicity in Bible historiale Manuscripts

Abstract This article describes regimes of historicity in manuscripts from the first fifty years of circulation of Guyart des Moulins’s Bible historiale (1291–95). The articulations of past, present, and future in manuscripts of this French Bible translation strongly center history in the here and now of reading, while, at the same time, manuscripts stress how the biblical past is mediated to readers through layers of discourse. For these reasons, this article argues that the regimes of historicity of Bible historiale are best described as “bookish,” meaning that they exceeded purely textual dimensions and derived their values and meaning from a repertoire of conventions associated with books produced in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. After contextualizing Guyart’s translation as a relative eccentricity in the cultural landscape of the late thirteenth century, this article hypothesizes how early fourteenth-century readers might have encountered Bible historiale manuscripts in the here and now of praelectio (public recitation) and describes the changes that Guyart’s text underwent in the first decades of the new century, which placed the regime of historicity envisioned by him in tension with the new paradigms introduced predominantly by Parisian bookmakers.