Hosting Quarrels: Bodies, Books, and Judges 19 in the Bible Moralisée

Hosting Quarrels: Bodies, Books, and Judges 19 in the Bible Moralisée, Vienna, ÖNB 2554

A lecture with Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner (Boston College)

This talk is about hospitality, literal and figurative, and the difficulties of disentangling the difference as represented in the first of the moralized Bibles produced for the Capetian royal family in the early thirteenth century. Through the lens offered by the final, horrific story told in the book of Judges, it addresses the fusion of hospitality and hostility, its only apparent opposite—hostipitality, as Jacques Derrida phrases it—represented in the words and images of Vienna, ÖNB 2554. Hosting quarrels arise in the Bible moralisée not only when Sodomites (in 2554’s French vernacular) come to claim the Dyakene (Deacon), the male guest under his host’s protection. They arise not only when the rape and death of the Deacon’s wife lead to war between the men of the city and the tribes of Israel. In the moralizing images and text, hosting quarrels also engage the sacraments, specifically figured as the Eucharist threatened by heretics (populicanz and mescreanz), and pagan philosophy protected by Jerome and Augustine against the rise of Aristotelianism at the university of Paris. All this is made explicit in two slim columns of explanatory texts lined up with their corresponding biblical and commentary images. Implicit in Judges 19 is a larger engagement with hosting quarrels that concern Hebrew Scriptures (host or guest?) transposed as the Old Testament to be read through the New, a structuring theme vigorously pursued in the Bible moralisée. And all these hosting quarrels pictured in 2554 mirror those beyond the manuscript during a period when reform of clergy and laity has become paramount in a Christian society reluctantly playing host to the Jews of Northern France, a Christian society yearning for purification and increasingly impatient before Jewish resistance to conversion.

This event is open to all and free to attend. Please register your interest on Eventbrite.