ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how a fourteenth-century illuminated manuscript designed for moral and spiritual instruction attempted to translate its anticipated female reader-viewer. It focuses on three representations of an aristocratic woman painted within the manuscript's ambitious visual program. The single female figure notably unencumbered by heraldic markers of identity depicted three times in the Legiloque compendium's visual program poses a real challenge to our taxonomies of owner surrogates or patronal proxies. The Legiloque compendium's second presentation of the female figure situates her in privileged proximity to Christ crucified. The third and final appearance of the female devotee occurs in a miniature that also contains the manuscript's final crucifixion scene. In the liuret dou Rossignolet miniature the reader-viewer is presented with a devotional landscape generated in response to a textual metaphor. And so, by design, perhaps even by gift, the Legiloque manuscript involved its anticipated reader viewer in a gendered tradition of moral-spiritual translation, a tradition both authorizing and, inevitably, conscriptive.
