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  • Translating Truth: Ambitious Images and Religious Knowledge in Late Medieval France and England by Aden Kumler
  • Lucy Freeman Sandler
Translating Truth: Ambitious Images and Religious Knowledge in Late Medieval France and England. By Aden Kumler. (New Haven: Yale University Press. 2011. Pp. xiv, 290. $65.00. ISBN 978-0-300-16493-0.)

To medieval writers the terms ambitious and ambition (Latin, ambitio, French, ambicion, Middle English, ambicioun) were pejorative, referring to an excessive striving for honor, power, or money. In the Somme le roi, one of the illustrated works analyzed by Aden Kumler, ambition is the fourth subdivision of the vice of pride, as the text says: “La quarte branche d’orgueil est fole baerie, que l’en apele en clergois ambicion, c’est desirriers mauvés de haut monter.”1 In a turnaround, Kumler, like a number of other historians since the 1970s (perhaps inspired by F. R. H. Du Boulay, An Age of Ambition: English Society in the Later Middle Ages [New York, 1970]), uses ambitious to refer to a praiseworthy thirst on the part of social elites of England and France in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries for true understanding of Christian beliefs. Indeed, the title of her book draws on that of an article by Nicole R. Rice.2 For Kumler, as for Rice, the term translation refers to the translation of catechetical material from Latin to the vernacular to make it accessible to the laity. Beyond this, Kumler is concerned with the translation of basic Christian beliefs into visual images that addressed (or incited) the spiritual ambitions of the laity for “religious knowledge.”

In the introduction Kumler lays out the types of texts and images to be analyzed in the four following chapters. Her thesis that images in themselves can be translations of religious truth is not a radically new idea. Among a multitude of possible examples she selects a class of luxury illuminated manuscripts made for lay instruction, books that “appropriated the contents of the pastoral syllabus” (p. 6) of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). Her study is limited geographically and linguistically to France and England, her explanation being that they were joined by a common language through the thirteenth and much of the fourteenth century.

Chapter 1, “From Necessary Truths to Spiritual Ambitions,” focuses on the copy of the Bible moralisée (Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek cod. 2554), whose images are accompanied by French texts. Kumler observes that the volume “offered its royal audience a highly mediated access to Holy Writ, and aestheticized vision of religious truth as a kind of gleaming object in ecclesiastical hands” (p. 16). She discusses selected illustrations, not as direct vehicles of religious instruction but as evidence of the post–Fourth Lateran Council belief in the importance of lay religious knowledge rather than simple blind faith. Much of this chapter is devoted to an exposition of the [End Page 128] decrees of the council and their dissemination via episcopal statutes. The newly formalized requirements of confession and communion provide the framework for chapters 2 and 3, “Translating the Modus Confitendi,” and “Translating the Eucharist,” each of which is also supplied with detailed expositions of the underlying theology—in particular, that of penance and the Eucharist.

The visual material of chapter 2 includes the Speculum virginum (the exemplar cited is London, British Library MS Arundel 44), written in Latin for nuns in the twelfth century as a “mirror” to be used for self-examination and regulation, and treated by Kumler as an ancestor of later visual pastoralia, which continued to employ the metaphor of the mirror and the diagrammatic trees that “render the invisible contents of the moral-spiritual interior in visible terms” (p. 62). She cites the Vrigiet de solas (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France MS fr. 9220), a late-thirteenth-century diagrammatic compendium, as an example of a moral mirror composed under the influence of the Speculum virginum, but intended for a lay reader-viewer.

This wide-ranging chapter then considers the case of the 1287 copy of Jean de Joinville’s mid-thirteenth century Roman as ymages (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France MS n. a. fr. 4509), a work conceived as a text...

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