Visualizing justice in Burgundian prose romance: the Roman de Gérard de Nevers illuminated by the Wavrin Master and Loyset Liédet

Scholars of medieval literature have shown how the presence of legal concepts—such issues as honor, justice, betrayal, and vengeance—is a constant in the narratives of this period. Yet far less attention has been paid to examining how these ideas were given visual expression in illuminated manuscripts of these texts, which helped disseminate knowledge of such legal practices as judicial duels among their aristocratic audience of kings, dukes, lords, and knights. This study focuses on the visualization of justice in Burgundian prose romances, tales whose plots are dominated by themes of crime and punishment. In particular, it discusses the interaction of text and image in two manuscripts of the mid-fifteenth-century Roman de Gérard de Nevers—a text belonging to the “wager cycle,” in which judicial proceedings are placed center stage—that were illustrated by the Wavrin Master and Loyset Liédet, respectively: Brussels, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, MS 9631; and Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 24378. Analysis of three key judicial episodes in the text, the wager itself and two trials by combat, reveals the very different interpretations of the work offered by these two artists. While Liédet is chiefly concerned with evoking the splendor and ceremony of the chivalric deeds that the tale recounts, the Wavrin Master brings out as fully as possible the legal lessons of the narrative, using iconographic conventions more familiar from manuscripts of canon and customary law texts and treatises on trial by battle.