“How did Queen Johanna of Naples read her Bible?” Understanding the the uses of the Bible of Naples (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 9561).

The Bible of Naples (Paris, BnF, MS Français 9561) is a small, illuminated manuscript that contains a Bible moralisée and a Christological cycle made for the disputed heir to the Neapolitan throne, Queen Johanna of Naples (1326-1382). This paper analyzes images from the Bible of Naples’s Christological cycle that have a heightened presence of women compared to other Trecento images. This analysis sheds light on how the manuscript may have been experienced by its female audience, namely Queen Johanna and her entourage, and how the Queen’s tumultuous life may have informed the book’s original visual content. I argue that the unique female-centered scenes in the Bible of Naples allowed the viewer to project herself into the realm of the biblical narrative, as outlined in the popular Franciscan text written for a Clarissan nun known as the Meditationes vitae Christi, whose author suggests that the reader meditate on the events being described and imagine that she is witnessing them in the first person through the activation of her senses. The use of this textual source, and iconographies inspired by it, are a conscious acknowledgement of Johanna’s matrilineal line, particularly the commissions of her great-grandmother, Mary of Hungary (1257-1323), with whom, for the sake of performing legitimacy, she aligned herself. The Bible of Naples provided one of the first sovereign queens of the High Middle Ages in the Latin West, with visual models that brought together what during that time were contradicting and even paradoxical traits: femininity and power.