BnF Français 22971 is a Middle French translation of Pierre Bersuire’s encyclopedic Reductium morale (ca. 1340), illuminated around 1485 by Robert Testard for Charles d’Angoulême. Fifty-six miniatures gather the marvels of the world, and the Public Domain Review collection essay by Mathilde Montpetit walks through them.

The founding confusion of the genre is that time and space collapse entirely. Alexander the Great, as fictionalized in the Roman d’Alexandre, is as reliable a source on India as Odoric of Pordenone — an actual missionary who went there. Terrestrial Paradise and China are equally remote and equally real; the Paradise may be the easier of the two to reach.

What makes the manuscript worth the scroll:

  • Traponee, f. 60v — an island near India where snails grow so large that people hunt them like wild animals, eat the flesh, and live inside the shells, “having no other houses or habitations.” The miniature shows a woman spinning wool in her shell doorway while a neighbor leans out of the shell across the way
  • Campania, f. 11r — Virgil invents a bronze fly that chases insects out of Naples, plus a trumpet-playing statue that harnesses the north wind to keep Vesuvius’s ash off the crops
  • Egypt, f. 15v — momia, “preserved flesh that doctors and apothecaries use”: the mummy trade filed as a commodity next to Arabian cinnamon and dragons’ stomachs full of jewels
  • Ethiopia, f. 20r — the Blemmyae, with eyes and mouths on their chests, and Compodes, men who move along the earth like eels
  • Provence, f. 49r — at Arles, three children bought each first of May with public money, killed, and their blood scattered over the crowd “for the salvation of the people”
  • Bohemia, f. 9r — the loz, which vomits boiling poisoned water onto hunters and permanently melts their skin
  • Kedar, f. 13r — via Methodius, the horrible race that overruns the earth at the end of the world
  • Bersuire also works as a proto-geologist: seashells in Macedonian caves prove the mountains were once a seashore

The essay’s sharper argument is about who this book was for. The scholar John Block Friedman notes that this copy is notably feminine: extra women added to the paintings, close attention to dress, velvet texture rendered in tiny white dots on the bodices in the miniature for Media. Charles’s wife Louise of Savoy arrived at fifteen, six years after the manuscript was made, into a household already run by his mistress Antoinette de Polignac. The two women seem to have become friends, and after Charles’s death the whole extended family moved to the French court, where Louise negotiated herself into power and put her son — the future Francis I — on the throne.

Which raises the question of the manuscript’s second miniature: female knights, female trumpeters, and the queen of the Amazons, captioned with women who “make war against all men who wished to make war on them” and “have always reigned together and still reign.” Christine de Pizan had published The Book of the City of Ladies in 1405. By the time Louise was regent, signing the Treaty of Cambrai with Margaret of Austria, the marvels were no longer the preserve of far-off lands. The Amazons had come home.