Written translatio was the transposition of the sense of a work into a new language and context. One of the intriguing developments of the fourteenthand fifteenth-century vogue for translations of Latin histories into Middle French prose was the combination of translated words with images that also ‘translated’ the text. Some of these texts included their Latin source, and some did not. Where a translated history sits alongside a visual interpretation of the same passage (an histoire), there must be not one but two translating campaigns to be read, viewed and interpreted. The vogue for Roman histories during this period inspired lavishly decorated copies of such works as Pierre Bersuire's translation of Livy's Roman History, entitled Ab urbe condita (1354–56), and Sébastien Mamerot's rendering of Benvenuto da Imola's Romuleon (1466). Their illustrations were closely tied to the text, to the point of offering what Frédéric Duval has termed ‘une traduction iconographique’ that recast the text as a source of teaching and moral instruction.1 Anne D. Hedeman's studies of what may be termed a combined written and visual translation of Latin classical texts also stress the more evident ‘modernizing’ effect that medieval illustrators have on the translated classical sources; in any case, amplification was a device that was used by some translators to clarify and to contextualize their material, and an illustration may be seen as a further vehicle for this approach.