Switzerland: The Moutier-Grandval Bible on Display

The Moutier-Grandval Bible was written and decorated with illuminations by the monks of the Abbey of St. Martin of Tours, France, during the reign of Louis the Pious, son of Charlemagne, between 820 and 843. It is one of the most prestigious of the 18 Bibles preserved, from a production estimated at around 100 copies over some 50 years.

The monks of Tours continued to work under the guidance of their abbot Alcuin after his death in 804. Alcuin, who, under Charlemagne (742-814), had restored the biblical texts in their entirety. Born in York around 730, his profound erudition and zeal for doctrinal unity made him a tireless defender of the Catholic Faith.

His reputation in this field was such that Charlemagne entrusted him with the formidable task of revising the text of the Vulgate, which had become highly erroneous through countless handwritten transcriptions. He carried out an important collation work using a collection of manuscripts from the scriptorium of the Abbey of Saint Martin, which contributed to the gradual elimination of earlier and erroneous versions of the Vulgate.

Alcuin insisted on careful calligraphy and punctuation, which had until then been almost completely neglected in the most common type of writing, cursive. He realized that this rapid writing, with its poorly separated letters and jumbled appearance, was responsible for many transcription errors. He therefore adopted a recently developed type of script, the Carolingian minuscule, in his workshop.

The Abbot of Saint-Martin de Tours had imposed standards: a single volume should contain all the books of the Bible, consisting of 450 large-format parchment leaves, or 900 pages, and written in easily legible Carolingian minuscule.

These new graphic characters were elegant, rounded, and distributed over four letter heights; the letters were linked together and the words separated, abbreviations were rare, and punctuation was very clearly noted. This allowed for easy reading and, due to their small size, saved parchment.

The manuscript takes its name from the monastery of Moutier-Grandval, in the canton of Bern, Switzerland. Moutier-Grandval Abbey was founded in the mid-7th century by St. Waldebert, Abbot of the Abbey of Saints Peter and Paul of Luxeuil (Franche-Comté), itself founded by St. Columbanus in 590. 

There is little evidence regarding the early history of this Bible, but it is possible that it belonged to Moutier-Grandval from the beginning, as the scriptorium in Tours regularly produced manuscripts for other foundations.

It remained in Moutier until the Reformation. When Moutier became Protestant, the canons, heirs of the monks, left the town in 1534, taking the Bible with them, and settled in the neighboring town of Delémont. When two and a half centuries later, in 1792, the canons were dispersed by the French Revolution, the Bible was "forgotten" in their chapter house in Delémont. In 1821, children discovered the work, which was eventually sold to the English court in 1836.

The Moutier-Grandval Bible is 53 cm high and 40 cm wide. The binding is decorated with gilded copper embossing. The Latin text, written in Carolingian minuscules by twenty-four copyists, remains easily legible today. It consists of 449 leaves of fairly thin parchment, or 898 pages. The various books comprising the Bible are mostly introduced by a preface taken from St. Jerome, and also include poems by Alcuin.