La Légende Dorée conservée à la Bibliothèque Municipale de Rennes

The aim of this dissertation is the analysis of a French manuscript
of the Légende Dorée, written at the end of the 13th century by the
Dominican Jacques de Voragine and translated into French before
1348 by Jean de Vignay. This manuscript is number 266 in the
Bibliothèque Municipale of Rennes; it was produced at about the end
of the 14th century. After studying the history of the text and its
reception, I applied a codicological approach of the manuscript and
sixteen other extant manuscripts of the text, made between 1348 and
1430, in order to compare them to each other. Also, those sixteen
manuscripts have been fully described. . Next to these comparisons
about the way how the books were made, I compare the iconographic
choices of the Rennes manuscript with the others to show the
relations between text and images and the originality of each
iconographic program although they use traditional motives. The
themes of the iconography seem to have played a major role in the
conception of the program by the workshop and show how the artists
expressed the main subjects of the text of Voragine. Once the
stylistic characteristics of each artist were defined in order to
give evidence of an organisated workshop, I went back to the whole
corpus to research former owners of the books, using the
inventories. As I did not want to accept the idea that the
manuscripts were made just to prove the wealthy situation of these
people, I used the fact that they had close relationships with new
religious trends in order to demonstrate that the Légende Dorée was
read with a sincere devotional purpose. In this way, the Rennes
manuscript has found its place in the medieval artistic production
and in a larger debate, the French Légende Dorée has been
reevaluated in the medieval society.