Charles VI’s French Bible Manuscript (Brussels, KBR, MS 9001–9002) as Mirror for Princes

Abstract This article examines the layered historicity of a French Bible manuscript made for King Charles VI in the early fifteenth century, an especially turbulent time for France and its monarch. François Hartog’s concept of regimes of historicity can shed some light on how political crises of the time shaped content created with King Charles VI in mind and on what his French Bible manuscript’s unique contents, annotations, and illustrations indicate about perceptions of temporal, causal, and typological relationships between events in the face of an uncertain future. The manuscript’s conception of history does in some ways corroborate Hartog’s characterization of medieval historicity in terms of historia magistra vitae—looking to great leaders and heroes of the past for models to emulate—combined with a salvation history that situates the present in between the Crucifixion and an awaited Second Coming. Yet, at the same time, as this article argues, the manuscript’s expressed anxieties, its efforts to change the course of events, and its impulse to bear witness to and memorialize Charles VI’s turbulent reign for later generations of readers all suggest more expansive, largely present- and future-oriented historicities than Hartog ascribes to the period.