Visual signs of the sacred page: books in theBible moralisée

Abstract

Medieval Christianity — a religion of the Word given by God to men, to be uttered by the prophets, written by the Evangelists and made flesh in Christ himself — involved a profound theory of communication which is expressed in visual signs as well as the verbal medium of the Logos. One of the most powerful of these was the book. The word ‘bible’ comes from the word ‘biblion’ which originally meant the antique papyrus roll but which Christians ‘appropriated for one book, Holy Scripture … the source offaith made palpable.’1 The range of possible meanings of this vehicle of communication compared with other signs of writing and stored knowledge is well described in the Rationale divinorum officiorum, a treatise on the symbolism and liturgy of the church written c. 1286 by Durand us, Bishop of Mende.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 12 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.