Vintage canada edition, 1998 Copyright 1996 by Alberto Manguel

Testament. One of the pieces, a prayer to the Virgin Mary written (so he tells us) at his mother’s request,
put in his mother’s mouth these words:
I am a woman poor and aged,
I know nothing at all; letters I never read;
At my parish monastery I saw A painted Paradise with harps and lutes,
And also Hell wherein the damned are boiled:
One gave me fright; the other, joyfulness.
Every article of the religious service displayed a story. The faithful would be able to follow the terrors of
the Last Judgement when the priest turned his back to pray (as on this fifteenth-century Italian chasuble,
opposite page) or as they passed behind the altarpiece (right, painted panels by Jorg Kandel of Biberach
c. 1525). (photo credit 7.7)
Villon’s mother would have seen images of a serene and musical heaven, and a fiery, bubbling hell, and
she would have known that, after her death, her soul was destined to enter one or the other. Obviously
she would not, in seeing these images — however dextrously painted, however long her eyes busied
themselves on the many excruciating details — have recognized in them the arduous theological
arguments developed by the Church Fathers over the past fifteen centuries. She probably knew the
French version of the popular Latin maxim Salvandorum paucitas, damnandorum multitudo (“Few are
saved, many are damned”); she probably did not know that Saint Thomas Aquinas had determined that
the proportion of those to be saved was equivalent to that of Noah and his family in relation to the rest of
humankind. Church sermons would have glossed some of those images, and her imagination would have
done the rest.
Like Villon’s mother, thousands of people lifted their eyes to the images that adorned the church walls
and later the windows, columns, pulpits, even the back of the priest’s chasuble as he was saying mass or
the panels at the rear of the altar where they sat during confession, and saw in those images myriad
stories or a single, never-ending story. There is no reason to think that it was otherwise with the Biblia
Pauperum. But several modern scholars disagree. According to the German critic Maurus Berve, for
instance, the Biblia Pauperum was “absolutely unintelligible to illiterate people”. Instead, Berve suggests
that “they were probably intended for scholars or clerics who could not afford to purchase a complete
Bible or who being ‘poor in spirit’ [arme in Geiste] lacked a more demanding level of education and
contented themselves with these extracts.” Consequently the name “Biblia Pauperum” would not have
meant “Bible of the Poor” but would have stood instead for Biblia Pauperum Praedicatorum, or Poor
Preachers’ Bible.
Whether these images were intended for the poor or for their preachers, it is certain that they stood open
on the lectern, in front of the flock, day after day throughout the liturgical year. For the illiterate,
excluded from the realm of the written word, seeing the sacred texts represented in a book in images
they could recognize or “read” must have induced a feeling of belonging, of sharing with the wise and
powerful the material presence of God’s word. Seeing these scenes in a book — in that almost magical
object that belonged exclusively to the learned clerics and scholars of the day — was very different from
seeing them in the popular decorations of the church, as they always had in the past. It was as if suddenly
the holy words which had until then appeared to be the property of a few, to share or not with the flock at
will, had been translated into a language that anyone, even an uninstructed woman “poor and aged” like
Villon’s mother, could understand.

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Reading in public fulfilled a social function in eighteenth-century France, as depicted in this
contemporary engraving by Marillier. (photo credit 7.9)

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