Dual purpose
La Chronique Universelle
(Genealogical Scroll of the Bible and Universal History)
France, ca. 1440
Illumination on vellum
Boston Public Library, Ms.pb.Med.32
no. 16
[Please use the scroll bar at left to view the entire object.]
This magnificent 34-foot scroll records the history of the world from Creation through the year 1380, with fifty-seven miniatures illuminating the text. It was created in a Loire Valley workshop around the year 1440 and is one of the earliest known copies of La Chronique Universelle, a generic title supplied to the anonymous French text by modern scholars. This Chronicle draws on sacred and secular sources to create a "universal" history that neatly ties together Biblical stories, ancient Greece and Rome, and the royal houses of France and England. It was clearly a popular work, copied at least thirty-four times and intended for use outside the ecclesiastical sphere. Other fifteenth-century copies of La Chronique can be found at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton Universities, the New York Public Library, Manchester and Cambridge in England, and various libraries in France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany. Of the known copies, however, the Boston Public Library scroll shares with that in Cambridge, England, the distinction of combining the earliest mature version of the text with the most elaborate illustrative campaign. Explanations of the fifty-seven miniatures in La Chronique Universelle are available [at the exhibition].
