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Anne D. Hedeman
Mediaevalia, Volume 34, 2013, pp. 111-153 (Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/mdi.2013.0010
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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mdi/summary/v034/34.hedeman.html
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ILLUMINATING BOCCACCIO
VISUAL TRANSLATION IN EARLY FIFTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE
Anne D. Hedeman
In late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century Paris, interaction

between members of the chancellery, the university community, and
the royal family generated a rich intellectual climate in which visual
and textual translation flourished and were inextricably intertwined
in books made for royalty and members of the nobility.1 Contact
with Italian literature at the papal court in Avignon at the turn of
the fifteenth century sparked interest in translating Boccaccio’s
work for the French courtly elite. Because of the popularity of illu-
minated manuscripts among the elite, translators drawn from the
French chancellery sought to shape the reception of translations
of Boccaccio through the interaction between translated text and
visual imagery.2
Petrarch had translated one story from the Decameron—that
of Griselda—into Latin circa 1373 and in doing so both empha-
sized its value as a source of moral philosophy and began to shape
Boccaccio’s reception.3 Around 1384, Philippe de Mezières trans-
lated Petrarch’s Griselda into French and incorporated it in Le Miroir
des dames mariées.4 Beginning in the 1400s, Boccaccio’s Latin De casi-
bus virorum illustrium was known in Paris and mined as a source of
exempla for, among others, Nicolas de Gonesse’s completion in 1401
of the translation into French of Valerius Maximus’s Les faits et paroles
memorables.5 As interest in Boccaccio expanded, distinct individual
voices emerged. One of them was Laurent de Premierfait, who had
made his name as a humanist and a gifted Latin poet at the papal
court in Avignon before coming to Paris in 1398.6 Laurent played
a significant role in the textual and visual translation of Giovanni
Boccaccio’s work from 1400–1414.
By the early fifteenth century, complete copies of some of
Boccaccio’s writings were translated into French and quickly
Mediaevalia, Vol. 34, 2013
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112 Illuminating Boccaccio
illustrated with dense visual cycles. Laurent de Premierfait, who must

have become aware of Boccaccio when he worked in Avignon, made
his translation of Boccaccio’s De casibus for Jean de Chanteprime,
a counselor to King Charles VI, in 1400.7 In 1401, an anonymous
translator rendered the De mulieribus claris into French as Des cleres
femmes, and in January 1403, the Italian merchant Jacques Raponde
presented what may have been the first manuscript of it (Paris, BnF
MS fr. 12420), decorated with 109 illuminations, as a gift to Duke
Philip the Bold of Burgundy, the king’s uncle.8 Shortly thereafter,
the Des cleres femmes was copied with few changes in a manuscript
(Paris, BnF MS fr. 598), illuminated with 107 miniatures, that was
presented to the king’s brother, Duke John of Berry, by his treasurer,
Jean de la Barre, in February 1404. Christine de Pizan’s Livre de la Cité
des Dames, itself a response to De cleres femmes, showed her knowledge
of that French translation circa 1404–07, and also revealed that texts
by Boccaccio in languages other than French were available to her in
Paris; she incorporated translations of three stories from Boccaccio’s
Italian Decameron and references drawn from Boccaccio’s De genealo-
gia deorum.9 Laurent returned to the De cas des nobles hommes et femmes
in 1409–10, revising and expanding his previous translation for pres-
entation to Duke John of Berry at the request of Martin Gouge, a
financial officer and counselor to the duke. This presentation manu-
script (Geneva, Bibliothèque de Genève MS fr. 190 I/II, henceforth
Geneva 190-I/II) was densely illuminated with 147 illustrations, and
was copied almost simultaneously with a slight expansion of imagery
into a manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 5193, hence-
forth MS 5193) with 153 illustrations for Duke John the Fearless of
Burgundy.10 This version of Laurent’s translation became wildly pop-
ular, cementing Boccaccio’s reputation in France. Not only did it
create an audience eager for more of Boccaccio’s narrative texts, but
it also established a horizon of expectations that shaped reception
of Boccaccio’s writings, whether originating in Latin or in Italian, as
history or moral philosophy.11
Almost immediately after the Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes
was completed, Laurent began collaborating in 1411–14 on the
translation of Boccaccio’s Decameron at the request of Bureau de
Dammartin, a merchant and treasurer of France, for Duke John of
Berry. Because of concern about his own grasp of Italian, Laurent
worked for three years on this project in collaboration with Antonio
d’Arezzo, a Franciscan. Working closely with Laurent in Bureau de

Anne D. Hedeman 113
Dammartin’s house, Antonio rendered Boccaccio’s Italian Decameron

into a Latin intermediary text that Laurent in turn translated into
French as Les cent nouvelles.12 Although copies of the initial dedica-
tory prologue to Duke John of Berry survive in later manuscripts, the
duke’s presentation copy does not exist.13 The earliest surviving man-
uscript of Les cent nouvelles (Rome, Vatican Library, Pal. Lat. 1989,
henceforth Pal. Lat. 1989) was made for Duke John the Fearless of
Burgundy circa 1416–18. Like earlier ducal copies of Boccaccio’s
texts, it was densely illuminated, containing one hundred pictures,
one for each of the hundred tales. The propensity to make “twin”
manuscripts for aristocratic bibliophiles such as the Dukes of Berry
and Burgundy makes it likely that the dense visual cycle preserved in
Pal. Lat. 1989 reflects what had been planned for both dukes’ copies
of Les cent nouvelles.14
Between his initial translation of Boccaccio’s De casibus in 1400
and the revision and expansion of it in 1409–10, Laurent seemed to
have become aware that visual imagery was an essential accompani-
ment of translation in manuscripts aimed at the bibliophile uncles
and cousins of the French king. Although Laurent never commented
explicitly on the function of the increasingly dense visual cycles in
his translations, he did incorporate visual cycles of increasing com-
plexity in his translation of Cicero’s De senectute in 1405, his collabo-
ration on the textual framing and illustration of a Latin manuscript
of Statius’s Thebais and Achilleis at approximately the same date, and
a revision of Pierre Bersuire’s French translation of Livy circa 1408.15
His discussions of the process of translation in the translator’s pro-
logues he added to the Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes and Les cent
nouvelles offer insight into his approach to illustration. In both pro-
logues, he outlines his conviction that translations had to achieve lin-
guistic elegance as they shifted from language to language, bridged
cultural and chronological divides, and, often, appealed to very dif-
ferent audiences. The prologue to the Des cas des nobles hommes et
femmes in 1409 offers the longest elaboration of Laurent’s thought:
It is necessary, it seems to me, that Latin books should
be changed and converted in their translation into
such language that their readers and listeners can
understand the effect of the sentence without enor-
mous or long efforts of understanding . . . and thus
this book, which is very concise and brief in words, is

the most ample and long among all other books to

explain correctly through sentences that lead back to
the stories. Thus in making this long and diffuse work
gathered from diverse historians by means of divine
grace, I want principally to accomplish two things:
that is to say to put into clear language the sentences
of the book and the stories that the author touches
on so briefly that he scarcely puts anything but the
names. I will summarize them according to the truth
of old historians who wrote about them at length. . . .
This is not to say that Jean Boccaccio, author of this
book, who in his time was a very great and famous his-
torian, abandoned the said histories because of igno-
rance, not knowing them, or because of pride that he
did not deign to write them, because he had them so
promptly in hand and so firmly in memory, he assumed
they were as common and well-known to others as to
himself. Thus in order that the book have all its parts
and be complete in itself, I will put them down briefly
without deviating much from the text of the author.16
Laurent’s translator’s prologue for Les cent nouvelles echoes the
same theme in 1414. He explains that he converted the Latin transla-
tion of Boccaccio’s Italian original received from Antonio d’Arezzo,
his Franciscan collaborator, into French as best he could, amplifying
when necessary:
I Laurent, assisted by him, converted the Latin
received from the friar into French as well as I
could, preserving the truth of the words and sen-
tences according to the two languages, except that
I extended the too brief into the longer, and the
obscure into clearer language, so as to easily under-
stand the substance of the book.17
Although Laurent never addressed the role of pictures directly in
these explanations of his translations of Boccaccio, his awareness of the
need to bridge cultures and his observations about literary genres in
his original translator’s prologue to Les cent nouvelles provide an avenue
for examining the role of visual imagery in accomplishing these goals
through what I, following Claire Sherman, call visual translation.18

Anne D. Hedeman 115
Glyn P. Norton suggests that Laurent used his translator’s pro-

logue for Les cent nouvelles to recast his translation of the Decameron as
something approaching moral philosophy. Laurent did this by situat-
ing Terence’s Comedies, Boccaccio’s Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes,
and Boccaccio’s Les cent nouvelles in relation to each other.19 Laurent
begins this process in the prologue by explaining that foolish men are
troubled in thought and confused by the blows of Fortune, but that
the wise are less vulnerable to her vagaries. As a result, wise men use
fiction to guide the foolish, to offer them solace, and to chase away
the thoughts that trouble human hearts. He offers the example of
Terence’s Comedies, which he describes as fiction that offers common
people fables that “represent the true mirror and form of all human
life [le vray miroer et la forme de toute vie humaine].” These fables
hearten the common people, diverting them from opportunities to
misbehave and displaying models drawn from the lower and mid-
dle estates. Laurent argues that Boccaccio’s one hundred nouvelles
embodied a higher form of fiction than that written by ancient play-
wrights such as Terence. Whereas ancient writers of fiction depicted
people from lower social classes and addressed a popular audience,
Boccaccio’s tales mix together “emperors, sultans, kings, dukes, counts
and other princes and earthly lords, men and women of all estates, be
they Christian, Jewish, or Saracen, noble or not noble, cleric or lay,
married or unmarried [des empereurs, des souldans, des roys, des
ducs, des contes et autres princes et seigneurs terriens, et hommes
et femmes de touz estatz, soient crestiens, juifz, ou sarrasins, noble
ou innobles, ecclesiastiques ou laiz, ou soient affranchiz ou astrains
en lieu de marriage].” Thus, the nouvelles are suited to divert and
refresh princes or other men as joyous and honest material to “sol-
ace and comfort [their] spirit [pour lesser et esbaudir les esperitz des
hommes].” Laurent mentions the Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes
explicitly toward the middle of his prologue when he first describes
the Duke of Berry’s desire to have the Decameron translated. Laurent’s
description of the Des cas in his prologue is laudatory; he writes that
it contains “only valuable stories/histories and pleasant things [his-
toires approuvees et choses ferieuses]” and reminds the Duke how
well he had received it: “the book was scarcely translated by me, the
above mentioned Laurent, before it found its place among your other
noble and precious volumes [lequel livre de vostre commandement
n’a guere fut translaté par moy Laurens dessusnommé et lequel livre,
comme je croy, avez begninement receu et coloqué entre voz autres

nobles et precieux volumes].” Laurent ends this section of the pro-

logue with an analogy from the classroom that effectively invites the
Duke of Berry to interweave the genres exemplified by Terence’s
Comedies with Boccaccio’s Les cent nouvelles and Boccaccio’s Des cas des
nobles hommes et femmes. He writes that teachers often interrupt les-
sons by telling joyful fictions in order to refresh students’ understand-
ing and allow them to engage more vigorously with their studies.20
His discussion of the three texts invites readers to consider Terence’s
Comedies, Boccaccio’s Les cent nouvelles, and Boccaccio’s Des cas des nobles
hommes et femmes in ascending order of relevance and complexity.
Because Laurent had been intimately involved in producing illu-
minated copies of precisely these three texts (and no others) for
the Duke of Berry’s collection, his categorization of their texts in
his prologue to Les cent nouvelles offers a framework for considering
the visual translations offered by the cycles of illuminations in the
manuscripts.21 It also allows us to examine whether the contributions
of mise-en-page and mise-en-image lead to different ways of translating
Boccaccio visually, possibly creating the visual equivalent of the “tonal
transformation” Norton identifies in Laurent’s translator’s prologue
to the Decameron. Given Laurent’s involvement in the production of
all three manuscripts, it seems likely that the images and their cycles
may respect the hierarchy established for their texts as they “trans-
lated” them by smoothing the chronological and cultural dislocation
between these classical Latin and fourteenth-century Italian texts and
the horizon of expectations of their noble fifteenth-century French
audience. It seems that the hierarchy of audience and the ascend-
ing complexity of text outlined in Laurent’s translator’s prologue
to Les cent nouvelles outlined for Terence’s Comedies and Boccaccio’s
Les cent nouvelles and Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes was reinforced
by Laurent’s carefully gradated plan for the visual cycles decorating
the earliest manuscripts of the texts. In these early manuscripts, the
images and the cycles of which they are a part ramp up in difficulty
or complexity as the textual genres that Laurent outlined shift.
Terence’s Comedies
Terence’s Latin comedies were popular among Parisian humanists

at the moment when Martin Gouge had an illuminated copy of the
Comedies made for Duke Jean of Berry for presentation in January

Anne D. Hedeman 117
1408. Letters written sometime before 1407 by Jean de Montreuil,

a fellow notary and a friend of Laurent’s, reveal that Terence was
publicly read, discussed, and mined as a model of rhetoric in early
fifteenth-century Paris.22 This heightened interest in Terence’s rhet-
oric was probably the reason Martin Gouge, who himself owned an
unillustrated copy of the text, set someone, most likely Laurent de
Premierfait, who had written an original accessus for Terence, to work
to produce the first illuminated manuscript of Terence’s plays post-
dating the twelfth century. The visual cycle and mise-en-page employed
in the copy of Terence’s Comedies (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, MS
lat. 7907A, henceforth lat. 7907A) supervised by Laurent visually
translate the text and operate very differently from those in either
Les cent nouvelles or the Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes. Given by
Martin Gouge, Duke John of Berry’s treasurer and counselor, to the
duke at the January étrennes ceremony in 1408, the manuscript was
clearly designed to present the Latin text as distinctly and accessibly
as possible and to use images to further this goal.
In preparing this volume with its 144 pictures, Laurent radically
rethought the traditional mise-en-page of Terence. Laurent admitted
he had consulted “vetusti libri [ancient books]” in preparing his acces-
sus, and it is possible that one of these was an illuminated Carolingian
copy like the manuscript that had been in the collection at the library
of the Abbey of Saint-Denis outside Paris from at least the thirteenth
to the sixteenth centuries (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France,
MS lat. 7899).23 A manuscript such as this, which included frontis-
pieces for each play and images of masked actors interacting in most
scenes, may have inspired Laurent to translate Terence for the Duke
of Berry exclusively through pictures.24 Laurent improved on the ear-
lier Carolingian model by isolating the illustrated texts of Terence’s
plays from the additional materials included with them in the manu-
script. A full-page frontispiece devised by Laurent appears in a short
independent quire at the beginning of the manuscript (fols. 1–2), and
the last two quires (fols. 143–59) contain Laurent’s original accessus
to the author followed by short summaries of each scene in Terence’s
plays, doubtless provided to help readers negotiate the Latin. The
quires between these (fols. 3–142) contain Terence’s plays, which are
carefully written out in verse, unglossed, and illustrated.
While Laurent was one of the contemporary French humanists
who were interested in Terence as a model of rhetoric, the man-
uscript presented to John of Berry seems to be less a response to

humanist interests than an illustration of Laurent’s categorization

from 1411 of Terence’s fiction as “fables” displaying men of the
lower and middle estates who represent “the true mirror and form
of all human life.”25 Laurent helped construct a hybrid human-
ist manuscript for the duke, providing him with the original Latin
accompanied by visual translations in pictures that densely illustrate
the section containing the plays. The mise-en-page and illustration of
Terence made the plays come to life for the duke principally by clari-
fying the social roles of its protagonists through purely visual means.
Almost every scene began with labeled representations of the char-
acters who speak in it, as, for instance, in the opening scene (Fig. 1)
from the play The Brothers, where Micio greets his brother Demea.
The illuminations planned for this manuscript of Terence concen-
trate on conveying the social roles of the characters. Laurent and the
others involved in the book’s production seemed to have learned from
collaborations with artists on prior commissions, for these Terence
illustrations deftly exploited fifteenth-century artists’ understanding
of a visual rhetoric of costume.26 The artists did not have access to
the Carolingian model preserved in the library at the Abbey of Saint-
Denis that doubtless inspired Laurent. Instead, Laurent (or Laurent
working with a libraire [book dealer] who coordinated production of
the book) indicated to them by brief written directions, which are pre-
served in one quire of the duke’s manuscript and on several folia in an
unfinished contemporary Terence that copies it (Paris, Bibliothèque
nationale de France, MS lat. 8193, henceforth lat. 8193).27 The art-
ists drew on common artistic visual vocabulary to illustrate these
social types. These mediating French directions provided to the art-
ists dictate what should be represented by single French words that
describe the profession or social role of the figure, or occasionally
identify a building type: “la mere, le frere, l’advocat, le paisant, valet,
chambrière, maison, houlier, putin, amoureux, l’aguies, laboureuz,
lautre [the mother, the brother, the lawyer, the peasant, valet, cham-
bermaid, house, pimp, prostitute, lover, the suffering one, the laborer,
the other].” The translation of this vocabulary into pictures drew on a
rich visual rhetoric that was understood by artists, by authors of visual
programs, and by the readers of the luxurious manuscripts produced
in early fifteenth-century Paris. The manuscript offers distinct charac-
terizations through dress for those whom the Latin rubrics described
as “senex, adulescens, servus, leno, parasitus, miles, eunucus, avocatus,
libertus, lorarius, ancilla, obstetrix, virgo, meretrix, lena, nutrix, anus,

Anne D. Hedeman 119
Figure 1. The brothers Micio and Demea meet. Terence Comedies,

ca. 1407. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 7907A,
76. Photo BnF.

matron [old man, youth, servant, pimp, low life, soldier, eunuch, law-
yer, freedman, slave, maid, midwife, young girl, prostitute, procuress,
nurse, old woman, matron].”
The libraire with whom Laurent worked understood perhaps bet-
ter than Laurent did in 1407 that there were limitations in using the
rhetoric of dress to establish character, as the example of Micio and
Demea, the two brothers featured in Terence’s play The Brothers, makes
clear. In the Latin play and its rubrics in lat. 7907A, Micio and Demea
are both categorized as senes (old men), but they are differentiated
from each other in both the copy supervised by Laurent (see above
Figure 1) and in the contemporary unfinished lat. 8193 that copies
it (Fig. 2). French directions to the illuminator in each of these man-
uscripts alter the types represented, in order to distinguish clearly
between the two old men for the play’s readers. A senex (old man)
typically wears a three-quarter-length houppelande belted low on the
Figure 2. The brothers Micio and Demea meet. Terence, Comedies,

ca. 1408. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 8193,
fol. 99. Photo BnF.

Anne D. Hedeman 121
waist, with sleeves closed at the wrist, a hood that cuts across his upper
body, and black boots, as do twelve of the fourteen old men appear-
ing in lat. 7907A (Fig. 3). The only two exceptions in this manuscript
Figure 3. Representations of senes (old men) in Terence, Comedies,

ca. 1407. Paris. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS
lat. 7907A, Left to right top row: a. fol. 11v (Symo); b. fol. 14v
(Chremes); c. fol. 23 (Crito); d. fol. 47v (Laches); e. fol. 52
(Chremes); Left to right middle row: f. fol. 52 (Menedemus); g.
fol. 74v (Micio); h. fol. 76 (Demea); i. fol. 84v (Hegio); Left to right
bottom row: j. fol.102 (Laches); k. fol.103 (Phidippus); l. fol. 123
(Demphio); and m. fol. 130v (Chremes). Photo BnF.

are Micio, who is dressed as a lawyer, and Crito, the old soldier who
wears a more modest version of the short dagged tunic and cap with
a feather typically worn by milites (soldiers) in the manuscript.
While Crito’s deviation from the norm can be explained by his
role as both old soldier and old man, the differing dress of Micio and
Demea seems to come from a perceived need to differentiate between
these old men because they appear together in several scenes.
Surviving French directions for Micio and Demea in lat. 7907A call
for l’avocat (the lawyer) and le paisan (the peasant), while those in lat.
8193, describe them as le frère (the brother) and laboreux (laborer).
The libraire who coordinated the artists decorating these manuscripts
intervened. In the execution of the images in Figures 1 and 2, the
authors of these sets of directions recognized that they could best cre-
ate distinction between the two old brothers by having one brother—
but not both—diverge from the established type for old men. In the
earlier manuscript for John of Berry, libraires and artists working with
Laurent differentiated the brothers in Figure 1 by elevating Micio, the
city brother, representing him as a lawyer, while neglecting the direc-
tion to show Demea as a peasant. The designer of lat. 8193 (prob-
ably the libraire who had overseen lat. 7907A) wrote directions that
only explicitly changed one brother’s status. In Figure 2, his written
directions lowered Demea, the country brother, to represent him as a
laborer. In each case, the designer understood that the categorization
of the brothers would come across most clearly if one brother retained
the dress characteristic of old men, as seen in Figure 3. However, they
chose different brothers to distinguish, with the amusing result that
the traditional “old man dress” used for Demea in Figure 1 is almost
identical to that used for Micio in Figure 2.
The illustrations so carefully planned for Terence connect with
the modern fifteenth-century era in their costumes’ careful distin-
guishing of nuances of social position through contemporary dress.
They operate consistently and evenly to categorize Roman types as fif-
teenth-century members of the lower or middle classes. All the paint-
ings that appear within Terence’s plays have similar scale and content
and all are placed at the beginning of scenes within plays. Characters
wear dress that marks them as individuals within a specific play, but
generalizes them as a familiar types across the illustrations of the six
plays within the manuscript. The immediate appeal of this visual solu-
tion is clear from its immediate adaptation in contemporary manu-
scripts such as lat. 8193, whose cycle was not overseen by Laurent. The

Anne D. Hedeman 123
illustrations to Terence offer the simplest visual solutions to the prob-

lem of visual translation. Pictures employ dress exclusively to distin-
guish social types, and mise-en-page to signal where new scenes begin.
The solution for illustrating Terence uses popular visual vocabulary
to translate members of the Roman lower and middle class into their
fifteenth-century counterparts. In such a visual solution, all pictures
are equally important and demand equal attention. They gloss their
text lightly by creating fifteenth-century surrogates for Roman char-
acters. As will become clear, the visual rhetoric ramps up in difficulty
when Laurent turned to the illustrations of Boccaccio.
Les cents nouvelles
Laurent’s translator’s prologue suggests that Les cents nouvelles will be

like Terence in their fictionality, but will differ in both their concen-
tration on a broader range of society (extending from lower classes
to kings and princes) and their ability to offer edifying tales suit-
able for princes and other men. The images to the text enhance
this distinction, offering more visual complexity than the pictures
to Terence had done, occasionally even approaching some aspects
of the moralizing content and visual complexity of the images that
decorate the Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes.
Revisions to both the text and the mise-en-page of Les cents nou-
velles encouraged reading them within a moralizing frame. Linda
Beck and Paolo Cucchi examine the structure and content of the
final product of Antonio d’Arezzo and Laurent’s collaborative trans-
lation; they tease apart the ways in which Laurent followed through
on the promise made in his translator’s prologue to convert the Latin
translation of Boccaccio’s Decameron that he received from Antonio
d’Arezzo into French, “preserving the truth of the words and sen-
tences according to the two languages except that I extended the
too brief into the longer, and the obscure into clearer language so
as to easily understand the substance of the book.”28 They reveal that
Antonio and Laurent’s translation did not simply amplify and clarify.
Beck observes that the translated text concentrated on presenting
Boccacco’s nouvelles as exempla, framing them more didactically by
introducing judgmental statements if the point of the nouvelle was
not clear. In comparison to Boccaccio’s original Italian text, she sug-
gests that the French elevated Boccaccio’s language, heightening the

registers of speech for peasants and the nobility, and often shifting
from direct to indirect discourse in order to more fully develop moral
points. Laurent also added cultural explanations, or geographical,
historical, and economic asides that would be necessary for French
readers. In five of the shortest nouvelles, he expanded Boccaccio by
adding paragraphs of new text. Even if this were primarily motivated
by the desire to create a pleasing and balanced layout with nouvelles of
equal length in the manuscript, the content of the insertions further
adapted the story for the Dukes of Berry and Burgundy, Laurent’s
first audience, by adding, for example, a substantial passage on the
role of the king as arbitrator of justice. This was the kind of content
that rulers might expect in a mirror of princes or a history.29
Laurent also revised the mise-en-page, introducing multiple
rubrics, summaries, and thematic statements before each tale.30 In
their division into discrete visual-textual chunks with miniatures of
consistent size and placement, this organization recalls the approach
to the illustration of Terence. However, unlike the Terence illustra-
tions, in which characters appear in identical guise in the complete
sequence of images from a play that associate them in an ongoing
narrative, the nouvelles are largely independent from each other and,
as a result, their illustrations are individualized. In that, they resem-
ble more closely the structure of the nonamplified illustrations to
the De cas des nobles hommes et femmes, as will become apparent.31
The beginning of Day 5 nouvelle 7 (Fig. 4) offers a good exam-
ple of the structure of the densely layered introductory materials
that accompanied each of the hundred stories in Laurent’s transla-
tion. Numbers in Figure 4 indicate the order in which this apparatus
would be read. Besides having a running title (#1) split over facing
pages which announces which of the ten storytelling days it is, there
is a rubric (#2) to introduce the summary of the tale that indicates
which nouvelle of 100 is the subject of the summary and identifies the
teller of the tale and the ruler of the day. This is followed by the sum-
mary itself (#3). Then a second rubric (#4) introduces the continu-
ation, repeating the information about the teller of the tale and the
ruler of the day. The continuation (#5) that follows expresses a rela-
tionship between the preceding tale and the one that begins here;
it can either make a thematic connection with the prior tale or sim-
ply describe the change of speakers. Then a rubric (#6) announces
the nouvelle, and a two column–wide picture (#7) sharply divides the
information given in #1–6 from the nouvelle itself (#8). This format is

Anne D. Hedeman 125
Figure 4. The beginning of Day 5 nouvelle 7 with numbers

indicating reading order, in Giovanni Boccaccio, Les cents
nouvelles, translated by Laurent de Premierfait, ca. 1416–18.
Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. Lat. 1989,
fol. 168v, © 2013 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.

followed for each nouvelle in the manuscript. Illuminations are clearly

a significant and integral part of the apparatus of the translation,
physically slashing across the page and dividing the introductory
material from the nouvelle. Those who designed the visual content
of the illuminations exploited this transitional position. Illustrations
often reinforce changes made in the translation or encourage active
engagement with individual stories, as consideration of illustrations
of one text that was significantly amplified in translation by Laurent,
and of a second that was not, will demonstrate.
The first image (Fig. 5), an illustration of Day 1 nouvelle 9,
accompanies one of the most altered texts in Les cents nouvelles. In
Figure 5. Noble Gascon pilgrim waylaid by brigands; She speaks

to the King of Cyprus, in Giovanni Boccaccio, Les cents nouvelles,
translated by Laurent de Premierfait, ca. 1416–18. Rome, Biblioteca
Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. Lat. 1989, fol. 29v, © 2013 Biblioteca
Apostolica Vaticana.

Anne D. Hedeman 127
the French translation, it has a radically expanded summary and

nouvelle.32 Boccaccio’s summary had been very short: “The King of
Cyprus is transformed from a weakling into a man of courage after
receiving a sharp rebuke.”33 As Beck shows, Laurent amplified this
for his readers with a blend of geographical, geological, and histori-
cal information about Cyprus, but also with more of a preview of
the story that the nouvelle would subsequently present. Several of the
details provided in the amplification of Boccaccio’s summary, as, for
instance, the description of Cyprus as an island, are reinforced in
the image. Both the summary and the fuller nouvelle that follows the
miniature describe how a noble Gascon woman returning from pil-
grimage to the Holy Sepulcher was attacked by bad Cypriots and
grievously wounded. After talking to a native who assured her that
she would not receive help from the timid, lazy, and negligent king
of Cyprus, she went before the king to seek redress and managed to
move him to action with a courteous jibe.
It is clear that the moments described in the summary and nou-
velle are what is portrayed in the left and right images of Figure 5.
However, careful study of the dress, gesture, and glance of the female
pilgrim offers more information, conveying the emotional impact of
what happened to her in ways that even the amplified text does not.
The representation of the woman in the left half of the illumina-
tion emphasizes her modesty when she was traveling with her female
companion and was attacked in the forest; she wears a high-necked
robe, carries a pilgrim’s satchel, and has downcast eyes, as two brig-
ands close in on her. Because of the ambiguity introduced by the
inclusion of a tall tree in the foreground that overlaps the pilgrim,
her arms, at first glance, appear crossed on her chest. Closer inspec-
tion of the illumination in the area of the dagger and the lower por-
tion of the billowing sleeve of the brigand to the right reveals that
this is not the case. The pilgrim raises her right hand ineffectually,
protesting or attempting to fend off the brigand who touches her
chest or the second brigand at the left who closes in behind her.
It requires careful looking to tease out this detail, which was made
deliberately ambiguous; the artists of this manuscript normally ren-
dered foreground trees smaller than the figures behind them for
clarity, but here they deliberately used the tree to mask the action.34
Only close looking at and contemplation of the image in relation
to the text would reveal the artist’s implication that the pilgrim had
been raped.35 The pilgrim is transformed in dress and deportment in

the righthand scene. She kneels before the king and glares at him,
eyes wide open. She seems to be dressed in an undergarment laced
down the front, perhaps as a reminder of her attack. It resembles
the illustration of Day 2 nouvelle 2 (Fig. 6) in which a man wears a
similarly laced undergarment under the robe that is being stolen
from him.
The rape and the contrast between the woman’s glance and
dress in the two halves of the miniature for Day 1 nouvelle 9 are not
described in Laurent’s translation. Nonetheless, this image pair
would key the reader to look for the words that the woman speaks in
the righthand scene to transform the king from a timid ruler into a
brave and magnanimous one who avenges her. By reading the sum-
mary above and studying the image preceding the nouvelle, a reader
Figure 6. Merchant Regnault de Estion is robbed by thieves; The

next morning he leaves the house that sheltered him, in Giovanni
Boccaccio, Les cents nouvelles, translated by Laurent de Premierfait,
ca. 1416–18. Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. Lat. 1989,
fol. 37, © 2013 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.

Anne D. Hedeman 129
would approach it knowing where to delve in order to find what

happened in the gap between the two halves of the miniature. What
readers would find in the nouvelle, in addition to the pilgrim’s trans-
formative jibe, was a speech about justice that Laurent added to his
translation. In it, a Cypriot responds to the Gascon pilgrim’s asser-
tion that a good king would promptly render judgment and justice.
Just an excerpt from the lengthy addition is sufficient to illustrate
how appropriate this added message would have been for the origi-
nal noble French audience, the Dukes of Berry and Burgundy, who
were, respectively, the uncle and cousin of the French king:
If our king manifested full royal office he would
profit all and deny no one. Each would follow, honor,
and love him sufficiently that they would not do evil
or attack others. But it is necessary to punish the evil-
doers and bad people so that they stop. Justice gives
our king a sword with two points and made with two
edges to punish and chase away the guilty and to
defend the just. A good king is husband to widowed
women, father of orphans, help for the oppressed,
mirror of virtues, example of noble works, patron of
public religion, sentinel and guard of the people sub-
ject to him.36
Clearly, this picture was carefully devised for its expanded nouvelle
in order to pique the curiosity and emotion of an observant reader
who would then, through Laurent’s amplified text, receive the kinds
of moral teachings more characteristic of the mirror of princes genre
than of Boccaccio’s Decameron.37 The image helps achieve Laurent’s
tonal transformation.
The second example (Day 1 nouvelle 2) illustrates a more typical
text in Laurent’s translation, because its translation is not as heavily
amplified as the story of the Cypriot pilgrim had been. Nonetheless,
its illustration (Fig. 7) also invites careful study, because it includes
a visual gloss that represents the subject of a conversation without
revealing the twist that gives Boccaccio’s nouvelle its punch. The left
side introduces the two protagonists of the tale: Jehannot de Croygnoy
and his friend Abraham, who were each prosperous Parisian mer-
chants. Jehannot is identified as a merchant through dress, by the
bright red purse hanging from his belt. Because Abraham’s status as
a Jew is more important than his identity as a merchant within the

Figure 7. Jehannot de Croygnoy and Abraham in discussion;

Abraham baptized in Notre-Dame, in Giovanni Boccaccio, Les
cents nouvelles, translated by Laurent de Premierfait, ca. 1416–18.
Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. Lat. 1989, fol. 16,
© 2013 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.
format of the story, he wears the red and white badge on his chest
that identified French Jews, rather than the attribute of a purse.38
The right image shows Abraham’s baptism in Paris at the Cathedral
of Notre-Dame.
Though not described in the text, the images painted on the wall
behind Abraham and Jehannot in the lefthand image concretize the
substance of the discussions concerning Christian faith and Jewish law
when Jeannot tried to convert his friend. They show a cross-nimbed
Christ holding a chalice filled with a red substance that evokes the
commemoration of Christ’s sacrifice in the Mass. The horned Moses
holding the tablets of the law and the rod recalls Moses’s reception of
the law on Mount Sinai and his moment of doubt while leading the
Israelites through the desert (Numbers 20:11–12). God commanded
Moses to strike a rock to provide water to his people. Because Moses

Anne D. Hedeman 131
lacked faith and struck the rock twice, he was not allowed to lead the
Israelites into the Promised Land. With their emphases on faith and
doubt, these wall paintings invite viewers to imagine the terms of the
debates between the two merchant friends.
This visual juxtaposition of the scenes of debate and baptism and
the visual encouragement to meditate on the content of Jeannot and
Abraham’s discussion set up a false expectation that the textual nar-
rative will demonstrate that Abraham’s conversion was the result of
his friend’s persuasive rhetoric. This was not the case. The nouvelle
offers a surprise when it reveals that Abraham had gone to Rome to
consider the church more closely. Although he was astonished by
the corruption and decadence that he found in the Roman church,
Abraham concluded, unexpectedly, that the Christian religion must
have value and be powerful if it could flourish despite its weak, cor-
rupt, and decadent leadership. Therefore, he converted.
The images illustrating Laurent’s translation, Les cent nouvelles,
offer a more complex interaction with the text than had the images
illustrating Terence’s Comedies. Pictures in Les cent nouvelles emulate
the visual rhetoric employed in the Terence illuminations by using
distinctive elements of dress, such as the merchant’s purse or Jewish
badge, to distinguish Jeannot from Abraham in Figure 7, and the
contrast between concealing dress and revealing undergarment
worn by the female pilgrim in the two scenes of Figure 5. However,
images illustrating Les cents nouvelles also divide the story into two
parts, often deliberately omitting the “punch line” that was the tale’s
moral, while guiding the reader to concentrate more carefully on
the text that describes the events that took place between the two
represented moments. Thus, the images serve both to identify char-
acter types and, more importantly, to pique the curiosity of readers
and guide them toward a fundamental moral message.
The Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes
Laurent’s translator’s prologue to Les cent nouvelles suggests that the

Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes is a higher literary genre than either
Les cents nouvelles or Terence’s Comedies. The illustration of the earli-
est manuscripts supports this reading of the De cas des nobles hommes
et femmes; not only do the illuminations offer moralizing content and
visual complexity, but they often encourage reading that associated

very different sections of the text. Further, select examples establish

overt contemporary allusions that emphasize the relevance of the
past to the French fifteenth-century present in fundamental ways. As
with the translation of Les cent nouvelles, pictures were an integral and
important part of the translated text from the beginning.
Laurent’s translation into French of Boccaccio’s De casibus viro-
rum illustrium established Boccaccio’s reputation in France as a mor-
alizing author. Written in Italy beginning circa 1360, the De casibus
contains a series of biographies that trace Fortune’s impact on his-
torical figures ranging from Adam and Eve to King John the Good
of France, who ruled when Boccaccio wrote. After an initial transla-
tion of the De casibus in 1400, Laurent completed a revised and much
expanded version in 1409 in which his revisions, textual amplifica-
tions, and explanatory digressions took a Christianized and historical
turn, presenting Boccaccio as a moral philosopher and “historian,”
as Laurent himself described him, and Boccaccio’s work as history.
The Des cas premiered in densely illuminated twin manuscripts made
almost simultaneously circa 1410–11. In the initial version presented
to Duke John of Berry by Martin Gouges as an étrennes gift in 1411
(Geneva, 190-I/II), and its twin made almost simultaneously for Duke
John the Fearless of Burgundy (MS 5193), the author of the visual
cycle and the translator of the text are related so closely that it seems
likely that they were the same person, namely Laurent himself.39
Laurent differentiated his new French translation from, and
coordinated it with, Boccaccio’s Latin original through mise-en-page
and illustration. He framed the translation with unillustrated texts:
two prologues by Laurent and one by Boccaccio appear copied on
separate quires at the front of the manuscript, and a brief colophon
appears at the end. There are no illustrations in these original,
framing materials—not even a presentation scene. Instead, pictures
appear exclusively in the translation of Boccaccio’s text, bringing to
life the relentless series of stories about human downfall at the hands
of fortune. Once Laurent turns to his translation of Boccaccio’s pro-
logues and stories, he begins to echo the absent original Latin text,
embedding the opening words of Boccaccio’s Latin within the red
French rubrics for each chapter. Such citations invited comparison
between Boccaccio’s Latin version and Laurent’s French translation,
and were a practice in many French translations from Latin in the
late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.40 Although few readers

Anne D. Hedeman 133
would actually compare the French with the Latin versions, the Latin
citation lent authority to the translation.41
Laurent devised the cycle of 147 miniatures to illustrate the Des
cas des nobles hommes et femmes, probably giving written directions for
artists to a libraire in a form comparable to that used by his friend,
Jean Lebègue, whose rare directions on how to illustrate Sallust
survive.42 Working from such written directions, the libraire would
have overseen execution of the manuscript in periodic consulta-
tion with Laurent. In inventing the dense pictorial cycles, Laurent
experimented selectively with a visual version of the rhetorical mode
of amplification that he had used in the textual translation. While
most illustrations, like those Laurent devised for Les cents nouvelles,
are direct illustrations of and guides to the texts of their chapter,
seven unique visual amplifications in the form of paired images
hone Laurent’s visual translation of Boccaccio. Laurent used these
visual amplifications to encourage different ways of approaching the
text; the paired images associate disparate sections of Boccaccio’s
text and often resonate with Laurent’s present by reflecting press-
ing contemporary political concerns in fifteenth-century Paris. Two
examples of visual amplification demonstrate how pictures could
relate to the text independently in John of Berry’s Des cas.43
The first illustrated example subdivides a chapter to include an
image of a widely popular theme in fifteenth-century France: the
suicide of the Roman matron Lucretia (Fig. 8). Lucretia’s story in
Boccaccio derived from the account given by the Roman historian
Livy, who describes her as a virtuous and chaste wife who was raped
by Sextus Tarquin, the son of the Etruscan king, while her husband
was away. Upon her husband’s return, and in the presence of her
husband, father, and one or more male friends, she described what
Sextus had done and killed herself to preserve her honor. Like its
text, the image clearly demarcates the youthful husband and older
father from the male friend who stands behind them. Because this
tale was popular in the fifteenth century, there was an established tra-
dition for its representation and models circulating in the Parisian
book trade.
Two other manuscripts in Duke John of Berry’s library contained
multiscene versions of Lucretia’s story, also based on Livy. These
provide an artistic context for the later image in the Des cas that is
essential background for understanding Laurent’s and the artists’

Figure 8. Suicide of Lucretia. Boccaccio, Des cas des nobles

hommes et femmes, translation by Laurent de Premierfait, ca.
1410. Geneva, Bibliothèque de Genève, MS fr. 190/I, fol.
89v. Photo: Bibliothèque de Genève.
self-conscious manipulation of visual tradition in crafting the illustra-

tion for Boccaccio. For instance, the duke’s copy of the French trans-
lation of Valerius Maximus (Fig. 9) presented the rape, seen on the
left, as the cause of Lucretia’s suicide, immediately adjacent, through
their close association in the image. Not only does the angle of
Sextus’s threatening knife extend into the adjacent scene of suicide,

Anne D. Hedeman 135
Figure 9. Rape of Lucretia by Sextus Tarquin; Suicide of Lucretia.

Valerius Maximus, Faits et paroles memorables des Romains, transla-
tion by Simon de Hesdin and Nicholas de Gonesse, ca. 1402. Paris,
Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 282, fol. 242. Photo BnF.
as Catherine Léglu observed, but Lucretia’s distraught state and rape

are conveyed by Sextus’s gesture of touching her chest, her gesture
with her right hand of trying to push him away, and the contrast
between her well-groomed appearance at left and her disheveled hair
in the suicide at right. All were details that a careful viewer would
notice.44 Typically, multiple images of Lucretia’s story emphasize
this causal link between rape and suicide. This also happens in the
three illustrations to John of Berry’s copy of the French translation
of Augustine’s City of God (Cité de Dieu), which also derive from a sum-
mary of Livy, in this case added by the translator to Augustine’s text.45
They show Sextus Tarquin’s approach to Lucretia’s home (Fig. 10),
the rape (Fig. 11), and her suicide (Fig. 12).

Figure 10. Sextus Tarquin approaches Lucretia’s home. Augustine,

Cité de Dieu, translated and with commentary by Raoul de Presles,
Paris ca. 1405–06. Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art,
Collins MS 1945-65-1, fol. 16v. Photo: The Philadelphia Museum of
Art, The Philip S. Collins Collection, gift of Mrs. Philip S. Collins in
memory of her husband, 1945.

Anne D. Hedeman 137
Figure 11. Rape of Lucretia. Augustine, Cité de Dieu, translated and

with commentary by Raoul de Presles, Paris ca. 1405–06. Philadelphia,
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Collins MS 1945-65-1, fol. 17. Photo:
The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Philip S. Collins Collection,
gift of Mrs. Philip S. Collins in memory of her husband, 1945.
This subcycle plays up Lucretia’s vulnerability at the moment of

rape by juxtaposing the initial snippet view of her face concealed
within a window in her castle in the first image with her sleeping
naked body as Sextus approaches and first lays his hands on her in the

Figure 12. Suicide of Lucretia. Augustine, Cité de Dieu, translated

and with commentary by Raoul de Presles, Paris ca. 1405–06.
Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Collins MS 1945-65-1,
fol. 18. Photo: The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The
Philip S. Collins Collection, gift of Mrs. Philip S. Collins
in memory of her husband, 1945.
second image. This juxtaposition is made more intense when we con-

sider the image’s position in the book’s layout, because the contrast-
ing concealing and revealing images of Lucretia in Figures 10 and
11 appear placed in the exact same position on facing pages of the

Anne D. Hedeman 139
manuscript, whereas the resulting suicide in Figure 12 is isolated in

the subsequent opening after the page is turned. These two sequen-
tial page openings (fols. 16v–17 and 17v–18) in the Cité de Dieu estab-
lish a causal relationship between Lucretia’s rape and her suicide that
is an amplified equivalent to the juxtaposition of two scenes within a
single frame in John of Berry’s manuscript of Valerius Maximus.
What is striking about these two examples belonging to Duke
John of Berry is the conservatism of the iconography of their sui-
cide scenes and the causal link that each cycle establishes between
Lucretia’s rape and her suicide. Laurent’s artists used the same clas-
sic composition for Lucretia’s suicide in the Des cas des nobles hommes
et femmes (compare Figures 8, 9, and 11), but its relationship to its text
and to surrounding images is totally different. Laurent amplifies the
scene differently and deliberately in order to use the deviation from
expectations to present Lucretia’s death as a political act. Lucretia’s
suicide is striking from a codicological standpoint, because it is the
only illumination in the whole manuscript to subdivide a chapter.
It appears midway through the chapter that begins with an image
(Fig. 13) in which Lucretia’s rapist’s father, Tarquin Superbus, mur-
ders his predecessor to usurp power.
This visual juxtaposition plays with expectations established in read-
ers such as Duke John of Berry by the tradition of illustrating the many
adaptations of Livy’s text with causally associated scenes of rape and
suicide. Because the illustrations to the chapter in the Des cas des nobles
hommes et femmes groups Lucretia’s suicide with the scene of Tarquin
Superbus, Lucretia’s suicide seems a response to or result of Tarquin’s
act of assassination and usurpation. Those interested in Roman history,
such as readers of Valerius Maximus like John of Berry, would know
that Lucretia’s death had political repercussions. After her death, the
third witness, Lucius Junius Brutus, led the revolt that overthrew the
Roman kings and ushered in the republic. This unique visual amplifica-
tion through subdivision of a chapter would have had a powerful reso-
nance with contemporary events in Paris around 1410 when the dukes’
manuscripts were painted. Civil war erupted in Paris after a decade in
which the mad king Charles VI’s cousin assassinated Louis d’Orléans,
the king’s brother, and that assassination was justified by claiming that
Louis was a tyrant. Laurent’s innovative juxtaposition of the scenes of
usurpation and its result and their deviation from the typical mise-en-
page employed in John of Berry’s manuscript would have keyed readers
to pause and think about the implications of the paired images.

Figure 13. Tarquin Superbus murders his predecessor. Boccaccio,

Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes, translation by Laurent de
Premierfait, ca. 1410. Geneva, Bibliothèque de Genève, MS fr.
190/I, fol. 89v. Photo: Bibliothèque de Genève.
A second unusual visual amplification from the Des cas des nobles
hommes et femmes exploits scale to inaugurate a fifteenth-century politi-
cal reading of the text as illustrating both past Roman history and con-
temporary fifteenth-century French history. The amplified pair of the
Destruction of Jerusalem by Emperor Titus and Marie’s Cannibalism
during the Siege of Jerusalem (Figs. 14 –15) includes the largest and,

Anne D. Hedeman 141
Figure 14. Destruction of Jerusalem; Titus receives tribute

money; Jews Driven into Captivity. Boccaccio, Des cas des nobles
hommes et femmes, translation by Laurent de Premierfait, ca. 1410.
Geneva, Bibliothèque de Genève, MS fr. 190/I, fol. 96v. Photo:
Bibliothèque de Genève.

Figure 15. Jewish noblewoman Marie devours her child. Boccaccio,

Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes, translation by Laurent de
Premierfait, ca. 1410. Geneva, Bibliothèque de Genève, MS fr.
190/I, fol. 101. Photo: Bibliothèque de Genève.

Anne D. Hedeman 143
because of their scale, arguably the most important picture in the man-
uscript. The scene of destruction is the only two-column-wide image to
appear in the manuscript. As such, even though it is buried in the mid-
dle of the seventh of nine books of the Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes,
it serves as an interior frontispiece in this manuscript that had no initial
frontispiece. I suspect that Laurent hoped that, when Duke John of
Berry first flipped through the book after receiving it at the étrennes
ceremony, he would be drawn by the large image to stop and read this
story first. What is interesting about this pair of images is its strong reso-
nance with political polemic in Paris circa 1410–15. In both contempo-
rary political writing and the frame texts of plays such as the Vengeance
de Nostre Seigneur, written in 1415, and including both these scenes,
comparisons between the first-century Jews in Jerusalem and the dev-
astation of the civil war in fifteenth-century France were common.46 At
the moment Duke John of Berry was given this manuscript, this pair,
more than any other images in the book, modeled how Laurent wanted
his audience to experience the manuscript—by dipping into it, making
associations, and actively interpreting past events as moral and political
models for the fifteenth-century present. It would encourage reading
the Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes as a Mirror of Princes.
***
By the time Laurent turned to the illustration of Boccaccio, he was
a master at using subtly graded visual translation as both a substitute
for and a complement to textual translation. Indeed, the ascend-
ing visual complexity in the painted cycles of Terence’s Comedies and
Boccaccio’s Les cent nouvelles and Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes
supervised by Laurent offer insight into how he wanted Boccaccio to
be received by the dukes of Berry and Burgundy, and reinforce the
distinctions he had outlined in his translator’s prologue to Les cents
nouvelles. There, Laurent describes classical fiction such as Terence’s
Comedies as representing the mirror of human life and presenting
the lower and middle classes. In contrast, he presents the fiction in
Les cents nouvelles as incorporating all classes of men in tales suited to
divert and refresh princes and the history of Des cas des nobles hommes
et femmes as valuable history that quickly found its place among the
Duke of Berry’s other precious volumes.
The illuminations devised by Laurent and his collaborating
libraires and artists for these texts reinforce the textual distinctions

that the prologue to Les cent nouvelles established. The visual cycle
in Les cents nouvelles and the textual apparatus that frames it are
much more complex than the images Laurent devised to subdivide
scenes and identify character types in Terence’s Comedies. In Les cents
nouvelles, images familiarize readers with the characters featured in
the nouvelles through details of costume or setting that function
as indicators of class, but the images also stage two moments from
the narrative in such a way as to pique curiosity about the text that
follows. These visual narratives often establish expectations in read-
ers that are undone once they plunge into the nouvelle and have
the pleasure of discovering the rest of the story. Nonetheless, the
pictures illustrating Les cents nouvelles are firmly embedded in the
weighty textual apparatus that separates one nouvelle from another
in Laurent’s translation. Finally, although the majority of images
in the visual cycle of the Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes are
firmly embedded in the narrative of their chapters, a small group
of images overtly encourages another level of interpretation. The
doubling of images that amplify a narrative within a chapter or a
sequence of chapters and the emphasis through changes in scale
or density of illustration that signal visual amplification invite read-
ers to contemplate the images in a different framework and to
interpret their texts as glosses on modern, fifteenth-century events.
These visual translations were an integral part of Boccaccio’s trans-
mission in France.
The work expected of readers to decipher these visual transla-
tions devised by Laurent and his collaborators resonates with the
different roles that Laurent outlined for history and fiction in his
prologue to Les cents nouvelles. These illuminated books reinforce the
French perception of Boccaccio as a moral philosopher who had
something to teach John of Berry. In the duke’s library, Boccaccio’s
Les cent nouvelles would serve the same purpose as the “fables ou nou-
velles joyeuses” told by masters that Laurent mentions in his preface.
Their moralized visual cycle and text would offer honest solace and
diversion, refresh understanding, and prepare the duke to return to
books such as the Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes, in order either to
look and read vigorously or to listen with absorption to their moral
lessons.
—University of Kansas

Anne D. Hedeman 145
NOTES
1. Paris was a center for translations commissioned by royalty, beginning in

the early fourteenth century. These translations were usually densely illumi-
nated. For discussion of them, see among others, Samuel Berger, La Bible
française au moyen age: étude sur les plus anciennes versions de la Bible écrites en
prose de langue d’Oïl (Paris: Imprimerie national, 1884); Anne D. Hedeman,
The Royal Image: Illustrations of the “Grandes chroniques de France,” 1274–1422
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Claudia Chavannes-Mazel,
“The Miroir historial of Jean le Bon: The Leiden Manuscript and its Related
Copies,” 2 vols., PhD dissertation, Rijksuniversiteit, Leiden, 1988; Claire
Richter Sherman, Imagining Aristotle: Verbal and Visual Representation in
Fourteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995);
Jacques Monfrin, “Humanisme et traductions au Moyen Âge,” Journal des
Savants (1963/3), 161–90; Jacques Monfrin, “Les traducteurs et leur pub-
lique au Moyen Âge,” Journal des savants (1964/1), 5–20; Jacques Monfrin,
“La connaissance de l’antiquité et le problem de l’humanisme en langue
vulgaire dans la France du XVe siècle,” in The Late Middle Ages and the Dawn
of Humanism outside Italy, Louvain, 1972 (Mediaevalia Lovaniensia, Series I/
Studia I), 131–70; and Elizabeth Morrison and Anne D. Hedeman, Imagining
the Past in France: History in Manuscript Painting, 1250–1500 (Los Angeles: The
J. Paul Getty Museum, 2010).
From 1392 onward, Charles V’s son, Charles VI (1380–1422), experienced
attacks of madness, and as time passed he was increasingly unfit to govern, let
alone commission translations. Perhaps because of the turbulence surround-
ing the lack of leadership, by 1400 the impetus for translations shifted from
king to the chancellery, which employed many members of the first wave of
French humanism. On the political strife in this period see Richard Famiglietti,
Royal Intrigue: Crisis at the Court of Charles VI, 1392–1420 (New York: AMS Press,
1986); Françoise Autrand, Charles VI: La folie du roi (Paris: Fayard, 1986); and
Bernard Guenée, Un meutre, une société: L’assassinat du duc d’Orléans 23 novembre
1407 (Paris: Gallimard, 1992).
2. On the French chancellery, see Nicole Pons, “Les chancelleries parisiennes

sous les règnes de Charles VI et Charles VII,” Cancelleria e cultura nel Medio Evo.
Communicazioni, presentate nelle giornate di studio della Commissione, Stoccarda,
29–30 agosto 1985. 16 congresso internazionale di Scienze Storiche, Commission
Internationale de Diplomatique (Vatican City: Gualdo, Germano, 1990),
137–68. On the university and on the changing political clout of its chancel-
lor, see, for instance, Daniel Hobbins, “The Schoolman as Public Intellectual:
Jean Gerson and the Late Medieval Tract,” The American Historical Review 108.5
(2003), 1308–37; and Daniel Hobbins, Authorship and Publicity before Print: Jean
Gerson and the Transformation of Late Medieval Learning (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
For the male members of the royal family and their artistic patronage, see
studies by Olivier Mattéoni, Servir le prince: Les officiers des ducs de Bourbon a la fin du

Moyen Age (1356–1523) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1998); Christopher

Ronald Schultz, “The Artistic and Literary Patronage of Louis of Orléans and
his Wife, Valentine Visconti,” PhD dissertation, Emory University, 1977; Millard
Meiss, French Painting in the Time of Jean de Berry: The Late Fourteenth Century
and the Patronage of the Duke, 2 vols. (London: Phaidon, 1967); Millard Meiss,
French Painting in the Time of Jean de Berry: The Limbourgs and their Contenporaries,
2 vols. (New York: G. Braziller, 1974); Brigitte Buettner, “Profane Illuminations,
Secular Illusions: Manuscripts in Late Medieval Courtly Society,” Art Bulletin
74 (1992), 75–90; Brigitte Buettner, “Past Presents: New Years Gifts at the
Valois Courts, circa 1400,” Art Bulletin 83 (2001), 598–625; Brigitte Buettner,
Il commercio di immagini: I mercanti, i Rapondi e il Boccaccio in Francia,” in
Boccaccio visualizzato: Narrare per parole e per immagini fra Medioevo e Rinascimento,
3 vols., ed. Vittore Branca (Turin: Einaudi, 1999), vol. 3, 19–28; E. Delahaye,
Paris 1400: Les Arts sous Charles VI (Paris: Fayard, 2004); Stephen Fliegel, Sophie
Jugie, and Agnieszka Laguna-Chevillotte, eds., L’art à la cour de Bourgogne: Le
mécenat de Philippe le Hardi et de Jean sans Peur, 1364–1419 (Paris: Réunion des
Musées nationaux, 2004); and Florence Callu and François Avril, Boccace en
France: de l’humanisme à l’érotisme (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1975).
3. For Petrarch’s translation, see Amy W. Goodwin, “The Griselda Game,” The
Chaucer Review 39.1 (2004), 4–69, with further bibliography.
4. For Philippe de Mézière’s incorporation of Petrarch’s translation in Le Miroir

des dames mariées, see Raymond Esclapez, “Philippe de Mézières, ‘Le Miroir
des dames mariées,’ vers 1384,” in L’histoire de Griselda et poésie: Une femme exem-
plaire dans les littératures européennes, 2 vols., ed. Jean-Luc Nardone and Henri
Lamarque, vol. 1, Prose et poésie (Toulouse: Presses universitaire du Mirail,
2000), 141–76.
5. See Caroline Charras, “La traduction de Valere-Maxime par Nicolas de

Gonesse,” PhD dissertation, McGill University, 1982.
6. For Laurent de Premierfait, see the essays collected in Carla Bozzolo, Un tra-
ducteur et un humaniste de l’époque de Charles VI: Laurent de Premierfait, Textes et
documents d’histoire médiévale, 4 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2004);
Carla Bozzolo, “Laurent de Premierfait et Térence,” in Vestigia: Studi in onore di
Giuseppe Billanovich, ed. Rino Avesani, Mirella Ferrari, Tino Foffano, Giuseppe
Frasso, and Agostino Sottili, Storia e letteratura: raccolta di studi e testi, 162–63
(Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1984), 2 vols., I, 93–129; and Carla
Bozzolo and Colette Jeudy, “Stace et Laurent de Premierfait,” Italia medio-
evale e umanistica 22 (1979), 413–47. I will cite editions of Laurent’s transla-
tions and the scholars who worked on them below when discussing individual
translations.
7. For Laurent’s translation ca. 1400 of Boccaccio’s De casibus, see Stefania

Marzano, “Édition critique du Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes par Laurent de
Premierfait 1400,” PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 2008; and Stefania

Anne D. Hedeman 147
Marzano, “Traductions de Laurent de Premierfait: le texte après le texte,” Le

moyen français 63 (2009), 73–82.
8. See Giovanni Boccaccio, Des cleres et nobles femmes: Ms. Bibl. Nat. 12420, 2 vols.,
ed. Jeanne Baroin and Josiane Haffen (Besançon: Université de Besançon,
1993–95); Brigitte Buettner, Boccaccio’s “Des cleres et nobles femmes”: Systems of
Signification in an Illuminated Manuscript (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1996); Paris 1400, 265–65; and Branca, Boccaccio visualizzato, vol. 3,
35–66.
9. For Christine de Pizan’s sources, which included Boccaccio among others, see
Maureen Cheney Curnow, “The Livre de la Cité des Dames of Christine de Pisan:
A Critical Edition,” 124–98, cited by Marzano, “Des cas,” 3.
10. See Carla Bozzolo, Manuscrits des traductions françaises d’oeuvres de Boccace, XVe
siècle (Padua: Antenore, 1973); Anne D. Hedeman, Translating the Past: Laurent
de Premierfait and Boccaccio’s De casibus (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum,
2008), 55–128; L’art à la cour de Bourgogne, 120; Boccaccio visualizzato, vol. 3,
67–201.
11. For the classification of Boccaccio’s Des cas as history, see Laurent’s introduc-
tion to the Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes, where he writes: “Jean Boccaccio,
author of this book, who in his time was a very great and famous historian [Jean
Boccace acteur de ce livre, qui en son temps fut tres grant et renommé hysto-
rian]”; Laurent de Premierfait’s Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes, ed. Patricia
Gathercole (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 89–90; and
Paolo Cucchi, “First French Decameron: A Study of Laurent de Premierfait’s
Translation,” PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 1972, 117–18.
For its reception as moral philosophy, see Hedeman, Translating the Past,
102–3; and Glyn P. Norton, “Laurent de Premierfait and the Fifteenth-Century
French Assimilation of the Decameron: A Study in Tonal Transformation,”
Comparative Literature Studies 9.4 (1972), 376–91. For discussion of the reader’s
horizon of expectations, see Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception,
trans. Timothy Bahti, intro. Paul de Man (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1982).
12. For an edition of Les cent nouvelles, see Giuseppi Di Stefano ed., Boccace Decameron
traduction (1411–1414) de Laurent de Premierfait (Montreal: CERES, 1999). For
analysis of the text, see also Cucchi, “The First French Decameron,” and Linda
Beck, “Laurent de Premierfait’s Les Cent Nouvelles: An Emblem for Cultural
Appropriation in Fifteenth-Century French Literature,” PhD Dissertation,
University of Washington, 2003.
13. For Laurent’s translator’s prologue addressed to John of Berry, see Di Stefano
ed., Boccace Decameron, xvi and 1–6. Di Stefano explains that the Antonio
d’Arezzo’s intermediate Latin translation from Italian does not survive, with
the result that it is impossible to isolate the contributions of the two translators.

However, Laurent is responsible for the original French translator’s prologue

that is preserved in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 129 and
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 213, both dating from the late fifteenth cen-
tury. For a fully digitalized version of the Les cents nouvelles in Rome, see http://
digi.vatlib.it/view/bav_pal_lat_1989.
14. On the phenomenon of “twinned” manuscripts as reflections of both shared

taste and competing collectors, see Jonathan Alexander, Medieval Illuminators
and their Methods of Work, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 138;
Buettner, Des cleres et nobles femmes, 23; and Anne D. Hedeman, “Making the Past
Present: Visual Translation in Jean Lebègue’s Twin Manuscripts of Sallust,” in
Patrons, Artists, and Workshops: Books and Book Production in Paris circa 1400, ed.
G. Croenen and P. Ainsworth (Louvain: Peeters, 2006), 173–96. For discussion
of the visual cycles in Pal. Lat. 1989, see Eberhard König, Boccaccio Decameron:
Alle 100 Miniaturen der ersten Bilderhandschrift (Stuttgart: Belser Verlag, 1989);
Christine Schwall, “Erzahlstructuren im illustrierten Decamerone Vat. Pal.
lat.1989,” in Miscellanea Bibliothecae Apostolicae Vaticanae / V, Palatina-Studien: 13
Arbeiten zu Codices Vaticani Palatini latini und anderen Handschriften aus der alten
Heidelberger Sammlung, ed. Walter Berschin; [comitato ed.: Raffaele Farina et al.]
(Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1997), 295–327; and Christine
Schwall-Hoummady Bilderzälung im 15. Jahrhundert: Boccaccios Decamerone in
Frankreich (Peter Lang: Frankfurt am Main, 1999), 21–105. It is possible that the
presentation manuscript for John of Berry was never completed and presented
to him, because John of Berry died in 1416.
15. For discussion of the Cicero and Livy cycles, see Hedeman Translating the Past,
23–53. On translations of Livy, see Marie-Hélène Tesnière, “Le Livre IX des
Décades de Tite-Live traduites par Pierre Bersuire, suivi du commentaire de
Nicolas Trevet. Édition critique,” summary in École nationale des chartes. Positions
des thèses (1977), 143–48; Marie-Hélène Tesnière, “Un remaniement du Tite-Live
de Pierre Bersuire par Laurent de Premierfait (Manuscrit Paris, B. N., Fr. 264–
265–266),” Romania 107 (1986), 231–81; Marie-Hélène Tesnière, “À propos de la
traduction de Tite-Live par Pierre Bersuire. Le manuscrit Oxford, Bibliothèque
bodléienne, Rawlinson C 447,” Romania 118 (2000), 449–98; Marie-Hélène
Tesnière, “Une traduction des Décades de Tite-Live pour Jean le Bon, ” Revue de
la Bibliothèque nationale de France 23 (2006), 81–85. Jeudy, Riou, and Bozzolo have
analyzed Laurent’s role in providing the apparatus in London, British Library
Burney MS 257 for Statius’s Thebais and Achilleis, and I am currently analyzing
its imagery. See Colette Jeudy and Yves-François Riou, “L’Achilléid de Stace au
Moyen Age: abrégés et arguments,” Revue d’histoire des textes 4 (1974), 143–82; and
Bozzolo and Jeudy, “Stace et Laurent de Premierfait.”
16. My English translation is based on the French text edited by Gathercole, De cas,
89–90, and discussed by Cucci, “First French Decameron,” 117–18.
17. “[E]t je Laurens, assistent avec lui, ay secondement converty en françoiz le

langage latin receu dudit frère Anthoine, ou au moins mal que j’ay peu ou en

Anne D. Hedeman 149
gardant la verité des paroles et sentences, mesmement selon les deux langages,
forsque j’ay estendu le trop bref en pluslong et le obscure en plus cler langaige,
afin de legierement entendre les matieres du livre. Et ainsi a deux longs et
griefz labours je ay par devers moy le Livre des Cent Nouvelles en latin et en
françoiz.” See Di Stefano, ed., Boccace Decameron, 5.
18. For visual translation, see Claire Richter Sherman, Imagining Aristotle: Verbal
and Visual Representation in Fourteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995); Buettner, Des cleres et nobles femmes; and Hedeman,
Translating the Past.
19. For this and the following, see Norton, “Tonal Transformation,” and for
an edition of Laurent’s translator’s prologue, see Di Stefano ed., Boccace
Decameron, 1–6.
20. “Ceste chose j’ay veue et esprouvee es escolles de toutes generals estudes, car
les maistres et docteurs ou milieu de leurs leçons racomptent aux escoliers
aucunes fables ou nouvelles joyeuses, afin que par interposees paroles de hon-
neste soulaz et esbatement les liseurs et escouteurs resveillent et rafreschissent
leurs sens et entendemens a viguereusement lire et escouter le remenant des
leçons ordinaires.” See Norton, “Tonal Transformation,” 384; and Di Stefano
ed., Boccace Decameron, 4.
21. For discussion of Laurent’s contribution to the production of a densely illus-

trated Terence for John of Berry, see Bozzolo, “Laurent de Premierfait et
Térence,” Paris 1400, 241–44; and Anne D. Hedeman, “Translating the Past:
Laurent de Premierfait and the Visualization of Antiquity,” Medieval Manuscripts,
Their Makers and Users. A Special Issue of Viator in Honor of Richard and Mary Rouse
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 27–50. For Laurent’s likely intimate involvement in
supervising the illustration of the presentation manuscript of Des cas des nobles
hommes et femmes for John of Berry, see Hedeman, Translating the Past. For his
likely role in producing the cycle of Pal. Lat. 1989, see Schwall-Hoummady,
Bilderzälung, 63.
22. See Bozzolo, “Laurent de Premierfait et Térence,” 114 and 127; and Hedeman,
“Laurent de Premierfait and the Visualization of Antiquity,” 28.
23. For discussion of the use of ancient books and glosses by Laurent, see Bozzolo,
“Laurent de Premierfait et Térence,” 115. One possible “ancient book,” a
Carolingian manuscript accessible at Saint-Denis (Paris, Bibliothèque nation-
ale de France, MS lat. 7899), is fully digitalized and available through Gallica
<ark:/12148/btv1b84525513>. Lat. 7907A is also available through Gallica
<ark:/12148/btv1b84521984>.
24. For Carolingian illustrated manuscripts of Terence and their relationship

to antiquity, see most recently, David Wright, “The Organization of the Lost
Late Antique Illustrated Terence,” in Medieval Manuscripts of the Latin Classics:

Production and Use, ed. Claudine A. Chavannes-Mazel and Margaret M. Smith

(Los Altos Hills, CA: Anderson-Lovelace, 1996), 41–56; David Wright, “The
Forgotten Early Romanesque Illustrations of Terence in Vat. Lat. 3305,” Zeitschrift
fûr Kunstgeschichte 56 (1993), 183–206; and David Wright’s contributions to Vedere
I Classici: L’illustrazione libraria dei testi antichi dall’età romana al tardo medioevo, ed.
Marco Buonocore (Rome: Fratelli Palombi, 1996), 168–76, 200–2, and 218–23.
25. For discussion of Terence in the translator’s prologue to Les cents nouvelles, see
above. For French humanists interest in Terence as a rhetorical model in the
first decade of the fifteenth century, see Bozzolo, “Laurent de Premierfait et
Térence”; and Hedeman, “Laurent de Premierfait and the Visualization of
Antiquity.” For the use of Terence’s Comedies as a schoolbook, see Claudia Villa,
La “Lectura Terentii” (Padua: Antenore, 1984).
26. For Laurent’s involvement in illustrating commissions prior to 1407, see

Hedeman, Translating the Past, 23–34. For analysis of the rhetorical qualities
of costume, see Christina Frieder Waugh, “Style-consciousness in Fourteenth-
century Society and Visual Communication in the Moralized Bible of John the
Good,” PhD Dissertation, University of Michigan, 2000; Odile Blanc, Parades
et parures. L’invention du corps de mode à la fin du moyen âge (Paris: Gallimard,
1997); and Anne H. van Buren, Illuminating Fashion: Dress in the Art of Medieval
France and the Netherlands, 1325–1515 (New York: The Morgan Library and
Museum, 2011). For more general discussions of costume, see Joyce Kubiski,
“Orientalizing Costumes in Early Fifteenth-Century French Manuscript
Painting (Cité des Dames Master, Limbourg Brothers, Boucicaut Master, and
Bedford Master),” Gesta 40 (2001), 161–80; Margaret Scott, Medieval Dress and
Fashion (London: British Library, 2009); and Margaret Scott, Dress and Fashion
in the Middle Ages (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011).
27. Meiss was the first to discuss the illustrations of lat. 5907A and lat. 8193 and their
written directions. See Millard Meiss, French Painting in the Time of Jean de Berry:
The Limbourgs and their Contemporaries, 2 vols. (New York: G. Braziller, 1974), vol.
1, 50–54 and 347–50. I would like to thank Marie-Thérèse Gousset for examin-
ing lat. 8193 with me and helping to puzzle out its notes to the illuminator.
28. “[O]u en gardant la verité des paroles et sentences, mesmement selon les deux
langages, forsque j’ay estendu le trop bref en pluslong et le obscure en plus cler
langaige, afin de legierement entendre les matieres du livre.” See Di Stefano ed.,
Boccace Decameron, 5. For the discussion of Laurent’s text that follows, see Cucchi,
“The First French Decameron”; and Linda Beck, “Laurent de Premierfait’s Les
Cent Nouvelles: An Emblem for Cultural Appropriation in Fifteenth-Century French
Literature,” PhD Dissertation, University of Washington, 2003.
29. This expansion with material suitable for moral instruction was also noted by
Carla Bozzolo in an unpublished paper which she generously shared with me:
‘Un homme populaire et de petit science’ au service des hommes de pouvoir:
l’humaniste Laurent de Premierfait.”

Anne D. Hedeman 151
30. See Beck, “Les cents nouvelles,” 83–117.
31. The number of illustrations within plays differs in lat. 7907A: the Andria has
twenty-five illuminations; the Eunuch has twenty-seven; the Self-Tormentor has
twenty-two; the Brothers has twenty-six; the Mother-in-Law has eighteen; and
Phormio has twenty-four.
32. For the textual analysis that I summarize here, see Beck, “Les cents nouvelles,”
34–35, 91–93, 134–38, and 195–98; and Cucchi, “First French Decameron,” 249–53.
33. Here is the summary provided in Laurent’s translation with italics indicat-
ing the portions that Beck showed were shared with the Italian Decameron:
“Une isle est ou pays de Midy maintenant appellee Chipre. Cestui nom fut
anciannemant donné du nom d’une cité d’illeuc jadis nommee Cyprus, et
qui paravant fut appelle Paphos. Ceste isle est assise soubz le soleil de mydi:
et est enclouse de la mer Capathie. Chipre fut moult jadiz renommee de
richesses, et par especial de or et de arein, qui es veines de la terre fut illeuc
premiermant trouvé. En ceste isle, de puiz pou de temps passé regna ung roy
premieremant nommé Guiot, seigneur de Lisignan en Poytou. Aprés finee la
Bataille que Gothifroy de Lorreine, aultrement nommé Duc de Bueillon, fist
ou pays doultremer, cestui Guiot par armes conquist et posseda le royaume
de Chipre. Il ainsi devenu roy, devint par nature ou aultremant alentiz, pusil-
lanime, et nonchalant de punir les injures, crimes, et oultraiges commis et
perpetrez en son royaume, tant contre soy mesme, comme contre ses subjetz
et estranges.
Si advint en son temps que une noble femme de Gascoigne, retournant pelerine
du Saint Sepulcre, avoit par aulcunes mauvaiz Chipriens esté griefmant injuriee.
La dame doncques, venant querir remede dever le roy, le poigny et esguillonna
par ung courtoiz brocart, en tant que cellui qui paravant avoit vescu pusillanime,
fetart, et negligent, devint magnanime et diligent vencheur des injures et for-
faitz tant privez comme estranges, et esveilla ses esperitz endormie.” See Beck,
“Les cents nouvelles,” 91–93; and Di Stefano ed., Boccace Decameron, 96.
34. See for example, the exterior scenes on folios 43v, 114, 134, and 150v, where
trees in the foreground are about half the size of people behind them. Large
trees do overlap characters on folios 158 and 221, but in neither case do they
mask action.
35. Compare the scene and discussion of the rape of Lucretia in Figure 9 discussed
below.
36. This excerpt is part of a longer discussion of Justice: “Au commencemant des
seignories terriennes les roys par consentemant de peuple furent esleuz et prin-
cipalement instituez ministres de justice legale contenant trois parties: l’une res-
garde Dieu et religion publique, lautre regarde soy mesme; et l’autre resgarde
les estranges personnes. Justice fut trouvee de par Dame Nature et ordonnee
par humaine saigesse pour rendre a chascun la chose qui lui compete. Se nostre

roy feist plein office royal, il proufitast a tous, et ne nuysist a aulcun. Chascun
lors l’ensuivist honnorast et amast; il ne lui souffisist pas de non nuyre et non
grever aultrui, mais is sefforcast de punir les nuysens et mauvais, afin que ilz ces-
sassent. Justice donna a nostre roy espee a deux pointes et tranchant de deux
costez a punir et dechacher les nocens, et a deffendre les justes. Bon roy est
mari des femmes vefves, per des orphanins, secours des oppressés, mirouer des
vertus, exemple de nobles oeuvres, patron de religion publique, eschargueteur
et garde du peuple a lui subject.” See Beck’s discussion in Beck, “Les cents nou-
velles,” 33–35 and Di Stefano, ed., Boccace Decameron, 98.
37. For Mirrors of princes, see Jacques Krynen, L’empire du roi (Paris: Gallimard,
1993).
38. During the reign of John the Good (r. 1350–1364), the badges that Jews were
required to wear were particolored red and white. See an article consulted
October 27, 2013 <http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/2317-badge>.
This mode of representation persisted even after the Jews were expelled from
France in 1394. See, for instance, a book made in 1399 that was in the royal
library by 1410, Jean de Montaigu’s copy of Honoré Bouvet’s Apparition Maistre
Jean le Meun (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 810) in which
on folio 6v Jean de Meun speaks to Bouvet and sees his subsequent interlocu-
tors lined up behind him. Although the text only identifies them as a doctor,
Saracen, Jew, and Jacobin, the artist introduces elements of dress and objects
to differentiate them. The doctor wears an elegant furred hood; the Saracen
wears a turban, the Jew wears a red and white badge, and the Jacobin holds
a manuscript. The Apparation is fully digitalized on Gallica <ark:/12148/
btv1b84471792>.
39. For a full analysis of these manuscripts, the scattered codicological evidence
that suggests Laurent’s direct participation in their production, and for further
bibliography, see Hedeman, Translating the Past, 55–77.
40. Such incipits do appear in Laurent’s translation of Cicero’s De senectute in 1405

(Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Lat. 7789) and in the translation
of Valerius Maximus, Faits et paroles memorables des Romains, completed for Duke
John of Berry in 1401 and presented in 1402 (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale
de France, MS fr. 282). It is interesting that Latin incipits like these do not
appear in either Pierre Bersuire’s translation of Livy or in Laurent’s revision
of Bersuire’s translation for Jean Chanteprime ca. 1410 (Paris, Bibliothèque
nationale de France, MS fr. 264–66).
41. For the authority of Latin in French translations, see Morrison and Hedeman,
Imagining the Past in France.
42. John Lebègue’s directions survive in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS d’Orville

141. For them see Jean Lebègue, Les histoires que l’on peut raisonnablement
faire sur les livres de Salluste, ed. Jean Porcher (Paris, 1962); Donal Byrne, “An

Anne D. Hedeman 153
Early French Humanist and Sallust: Jean Lebègue and the Iconographical
Programme for the Catiline and Jugurtha,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld
Institutes 49 (1986), 41–65; and Anne D. Hedeman, “L’humanisme et les
manuscrits enlumines: Jean Lebègue et le manuscrit de Salluste à Geneve,
Bibliothèque publique et universitaire Ms. 54, ” in La création artistique en France
autour de 1400, Rencontres de l’école du Louvre, 19 (Paris: l’Ecole du Louvre,
2006), 443–57. For evidence that Laurent may have written directions to artists
keyed by incipit, see Hedeman, Translating the Past, 139–45.
43. For discussion of the full set of amplifications, see Hedeman, Translating the
Past, 86–111.
44. See Catherine Léglu, “Translating Lucretia: Word, Image and ‘Ethical Non-
Indifference’ in Simon de Hesdin’s Translation of Valerius Maximus’s Facta
et dicta memorabilia,” in Rethinking Medieval Translation: Ethics, Politics, Theory,
ed. Emma Campbell and Robert Mills (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012),
61–83; Diane Wolfthal, Images of Rape: The Heroic Tradition and its Alternatives
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Anne D. Hedeman,
“Translating Power for the Princes of the Blood: Laurent de Premierfait’s Des
cas des nobles hommes et femmes,” in Textual and Visual Representations of Power and
Justice in Medieval France, ed. Rosalind Brown-Grant, Bernard Ribémont, and
Anne D. Hedeman (London: Ashgate, forthcoming).
45. For careful analysis of the complex relationship between text, image, and
commentary unique to this Cité de Dieu, see Heather Tennison, “Valois Court
Politics in the Time of John of Berry and the Collins Cité de Dieu: PMA Collins
1945-65-1,” Unpublished MA thesis, University of Illinois, 2011.
46. For further discussion of this pair, see Hedeman, Translating the Past, 116–27;
and Hedeman, “Translating Power.”

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VISUAL TRANSLATION IN EARLY FIFTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE

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illustrated with dense visual cycles. Laurent de Premierfait, who must

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Dammartin’s house, Antonio rendered Boccaccio’s Italian Decameron

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the most ample and long among all other books to

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Glyn P. Norton suggests that Laurent used his translator’s pro-

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nobles et precieux volumes].” Laurent ends this section of the pro-

Terence’s Latin comedies were popular among Parisian humanists

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1408. Letters written sometime before 1407 by Jean de Montreuil,

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humanist interests than an illustration of Laurent’s categorization

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Figure 1. The brothers Micio and Demea meet. Terence Comedies,

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Figure 2. The brothers Micio and Demea meet. Terence, Comedies,

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Figure 3. Representations of senes (old men) in Terence, Comedies,

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illustrations to Terence offer the simplest visual solutions to the prob-

Les cents nouvelles

Laurent’s translator’s prologue suggests that Les cents nouvelles will be

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Figure 4. The beginning of Day 5 nouvelle 7 with numbers

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followed for each nouvelle in the manuscript. Illuminations are clearly

Figure 5. Noble Gascon pilgrim waylaid by brigands; She speaks

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the French translation, it has a radically expanded summary and

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Figure 6. Merchant Regnault de Estion is robbed by thieves; The

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would approach it knowing where to delve in order to find what

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Figure 7. Jehannot de Croygnoy and Abraham in discussion;

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The Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes

Laurent’s translator’s prologue to Les cent nouvelles suggests that the

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very different sections of the text. Further, select examples establish

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Figure 8. Suicide of Lucretia. Boccaccio, Des cas des nobles

self-conscious manipulation of visual tradition in crafting the illustra-

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Figure 9. Rape of Lucretia by Sextus Tarquin; Suicide of Lucretia.

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