Interpreting Job’s Silence in the Bible historiale

Who will grant me that my words may be written?Who will grant me that they may be marked down in a book?With an iron pen and in a plate of lead, or else be graven with an instrument in flint stone.For I know that my Redeemer liveth,and in the last day I shall rise out of the earth.

Job 19.23–25²

Foreword

In a 1979 special issue of New Literary History, a group of leading medievalists came together to reflect on the continued relevance of studying the Middle Ages and the problems of reading its texts from a modern perspective. In response to Paul Zumthor’s and Hans Robert Jauss’s discussion, in the same issue, on the possibility of overcoming the alterity of the Middle Ages, Eugene Vance proposes an alternative, second-order hermeneutics that underlies much of his work:

During the last few years, my efforts as a reader of medieval literature (if such a literature may be said to exist) have been devoted to the study of texts less as objects of interpretation than as pragmatic demonstrations of problems of interpretation. Indeed, the vernacular literature of the Middle Ages arose during a time when two distinct hermeneutical traditions collided (the Augustinian and the neo- Aristotelian), and its poetry often reflects a competition between contradictory understandings of “understanding” that affected other spheres of culture as well (e.g., the judicial, the theological, the scientific). A hermeneutical consciousness was already important, if not determining, in the “horizon of expectations” of the Middle Ages. [. . .] Medieval poetry interprets problems of interpretation dramatically, rather than logically, just as a musician interprets problems of musical comprehension in a sonata by playing rather than by analyzing them.

(382–83)

In honor of Eugene Vance and his enduring contributions to the study of medieval hermeneutics and semiotics, I take up his proposal that “Even silence may be interpreted by any decent hermeneutician; and as for death, it is the very condition of meaning and signification” (Vance 382). What follows is a case study of one such confrontation between medieval systems of meaning that results in an interpretive act of silence, and strategies within the manuscript tradition to interpret it. This silencing occurs in the Book of Job, itself a hermeneutic hall of mirrors that tests the limits of understanding.

Guyart des Moulins and his Bible historiale

In 1291, in the northern French village of Aire-sur-la-Lys, priest and canon Guyart des Moulins began a composite translation of the Latin Vulgate Bible and Peter Comestor’s Historia Scholastica, with the stated goal to “faire laies personnes entendre les histoires des escriptures anciennes.”³ Completed four years later, his Bible historiale was not the first French-language Bible, but it quickly became the translation of choice among aristocratic lay patrons and remained so until the Reformation. It survives in about a hundred manuscript copies, numerous early print editions and even translations into other vernacular languages.⁴

Contrary to Margaret Deanesly’s narrative of the medieval church’s opposition to vernacular Bibles, as Leonard Boyle has shown, translations per se were less at issue than the perceived threat of their appropriation as a recruitment tool for heretical and anticlerical movements.⁵ Centers of Waldensian, Cathar and, later, Lollard activity prompted regional bans or restrictions, but elsewhere, the Church was involved in the production of vernacular Bibles that circulated freely in a variety of languages and forms (McGerr 215; Salvador, Vérité et écriture(s) 42–43; Sneddon, A Critical Edition 28–35).

At the same time, Waldensians—lay preachers who eschewed church authority to read and debate translated Bibles—exemplified the risks of translation for the thirteenth-century church. To curb unbounded interpretation, translators’ choices often mirror the clergy’s intercessory function; as the laity depended upon the priest’s mediation in administering the sacraments, so too did it need his teaching to obtain from the Bible lessons appropriate to their condition.

In the Bible historiale, the Historia Scholastica ensures both intercultural and institutional mediation, contextualizing and “domesticating” the foreign while also...