Feasting at the Lord's Table

The miniature of the eschatological banquet of the Just in paradise pictured at the end of the Ambrosian Bible is read here through the lens of a cultural history or histoire des mentalités. The banquet motif is interpreted as a symbolic representation of transcendent order, by means of a bricolage of preexisting images and iconographies of social order. Ultimately, the eschatological setting of the aristocratic banquet involves a polemical critique of a society that excluded Jews, and a vision of the courtly, exclusionary hierarchies of aristocratic Europe subverted.