Overview

The thirteenth century stands out in the history of the medieval Bible for three fundamental developments – the number of Bibles copied, the fact that most of these Bibles are pandects (complete in one volume) and the appearance of a new format, the small portable Bible. For the first time in the Middle Ages, the Bible became a book owned and used by individuals, ranging from the students and masters of the new and rapidly growing universities, to the bishops and priests of a church that was emphasising its pastoral role as never before, to the wandering preachers of the Franciscan and Dominican orders. Moreover, although the language of the Latin Bible meant its use and study were primarily the province of the clergy, the existence of many finely illuminated copies suggests that Bibles were also owned and treasured by wealthy members of the nobility and urban elite.

It is impossible to overemphasise the importance of the number of thirteenth-century Bibles that survive from all parts of Europe. Although there is no general census of these Bibles, a few statistics illustrate the trend. In the first volume alone of the Catalogue général of the Latin manuscripts in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, there are ninety-one complete thirteenth-century Bibles. Robert Branner catalogued approximately 177 illuminated Bibles in his survey of manuscripts illustrated in Paris in the thirteenth century. In 1960, Josephine Case Schnurman surveyed a broad range of catalogues of European libraries and compiled a list of 642 Bibles dating from c. 1200 to the mid-fourteenth century. She was primarily interested in listing examples of small Bibles, and therefore more than 420 of her manuscripts are less than 200 mm in height.