Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Janina Ramírez

sinful by the church, including lesbianism and sodomy.58 They have been described as ‘windows opening onto medieval society of the time’, but rather than representing reality, it is evident that they were cautionary images, designed to put fear in the hearts of the Parisian nobility that evil was bearing down on them.59 Included in the thousands of images are heretics, who are often compared unfavourably to Jews and accused of perverse behaviour. In a representation of Balthazar feasting with the treasures stolen from the temple of Jerusalem, two couples are shown embracing. Labelled ‘heretics’, the woman looks into a mirror while engaged in a clinch. Opposite, a young monk embraces an older man. Heretics are painted as bad people, displaying the deadly sins of vanity and lustfulness, but throughout these manuscripts there are many different types of evil and subversive entities. The Moralising Bibles present a thirteenth-century world full of deviance, threats, moral ambiguity and sin.