Prof. Kathryn Smith (NYU): Scripture Transformed in Late Medieval England: the Religious, Artistic, and Social Worlds of the Welles-Ros Bible (Paris, BnF fr. 1)

The most complete surviving witness and sole extant illuminated copy of the Anglo-Norman Bible, the Welles-Ros Bible (Paris, BnF MS fr. 1) is a grand multilingual manuscript, produced in the later fourteenth century on the order of one or more of the matriarchs of the baronial Welles family of Lincolnshire. This paper considers the circumstances of the Bible’s commission and argues that the volume’s rich pictorial and heraldic program reframes the story of Christian salvation as Welles family history. Through analysis it becomes clear that the manuscript's main artist read the scriptural text assiduously, adapting or even rejecting his wide-ranging, trans-regional models in order to visualize for his noble clients both the sense of the vernacular translation and its very words. The talk sheds new light on lay literate and religious aspiration; the history of Bible translation and reception; women's cultural patronage; artists' literacy and working methods; medieval constructions of gender, sexuality, health, memory, and the emotions; and English art, society, and culture after the Black Death.