Manual Labour and Biblical Reading in Late Medieval France
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Margriet Hoogvliet
Abstract
This article discusses artisans and people doing manual work in the French-speaking areas of Western Europe who owned and read the Bible or parts of its text during the late Middle Ages and the early sixteenth century. The historical evidence is based on post-mortem inventories from Amiens, Tournai, Lyon, and the Toulouse area. These documents show that Bibles were present in the private homes of artisans, some of them well-to-do, but others quite destitute. This development was probably related to a shift in the cultural representation of manual work in the same period: from a divine punishment into a social space of religion. The simple artisan life of the holy family, as imagined based upon the Gospel text, and their religious reading practices were recommended as an example to follow by both lay people and clerics.
Article note
The research for this article has been funded by the Dutch Research Council (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research/NWO) for the research project “Cities of Readers: Religious Literacies in the Long Fifteenth Century” (2015–2020) conducted at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. This article builds further on my contributions to an earlier publication: Sabrina Corbellini and Margriet Hoogvliet, “Artisans and Religious Reading in Late Medieval Italy and Northern France (c. 1400–c. 1520),” Journal for Medieval and Early Modern Studies 43/3 (2013): 521–44.
© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Bibles in the Hands of Readers: Dutch, English, French, and Italian Perspectives
- Articles
- Shaping Religious Reading Cultures in the Early Modern Netherlands: The “Glossed Bibles” of Jacob van Liesvelt and Willem Vorsterman (1532–1534ff.)
- The Quest for the Early Modern Bible Reader: The Dutch Vorsterman Bible (1533–1534), its Readers and Users
- Framing Biblical Reading Practices: The Impact of the Paratext of Jacob van Liesvelt’s Bibles (1522–1545)
- The Elizabethan Catholic New Testament and Its Readers
- Manual Labour and Biblical Reading in Late Medieval France
- Vernacular Books and Domestic Devotion in Cinquecento Italy
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Bibles in the Hands of Readers: Dutch, English, French, and Italian Perspectives
- Articles
- Shaping Religious Reading Cultures in the Early Modern Netherlands: The “Glossed Bibles” of Jacob van Liesvelt and Willem Vorsterman (1532–1534ff.)
- The Quest for the Early Modern Bible Reader: The Dutch Vorsterman Bible (1533–1534), its Readers and Users
- Framing Biblical Reading Practices: The Impact of the Paratext of Jacob van Liesvelt’s Bibles (1522–1545)
- The Elizabethan Catholic New Testament and Its Readers
- Manual Labour and Biblical Reading in Late Medieval France
- Vernacular Books and Domestic Devotion in Cinquecento Italy
