Making the Bible French: The Bible historiale and the Medieval Lay Reader

"Making the Bible French should be essential reading for all medievalists and those interested in the place of the Bible in vernacular literary culture. It is an unusually ambitious, intellectually exciting, and compulsively readable book that promises to restore scriptural translation and devotional literature to the place of prominence they deserve in the field."

Noah Guynn, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of California, Davis

"Making the Bible French is a study of the strategies that made Guyart des Moulins’s Bible historiale the most popular translation of the Bible in the French Middle Ages."

Jeanette Beer, Professor Emerita, Purdue University and senior member, Lady Margaret Hall and St. Hilda’s College, University of Oxford

"Patterson’s study of this long-lived thirteenth-century Bible for lay readers reveals its vernacular translation as acculturation, persuasion, occultation, exegesis; as culture shock responsive to 1291’s crusading losses; and as indebted to narrative fiction’s conventions, especially in presenting problematic Bible stories. Smart, scholarly, theoretically alert, this is an exciting book, contributing to religious, literary, and cultural history in north-western and central Europe, and of special value to modern literary study in French, English, Flemish, Dutch, and German."

Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Thomas F.X. and Theresa Mullarkey Chair in Literature (Emerita), Fordham University