St. Didier's Flowering Verge

I co-wrote this article with Virginia Blanton during my time as an undergraduate research associate at the University of Missouri – Kansas City. It was published in Different Visions: New Perspectives on Medieval Art 8 (2022). I transcribed the manuscript text, built a computational vocabulary analysis of the vie using Voyant Tools, and co-authored throughout.

The paper examines a small, illuminated devotional book produced in 1902 by Joseph Royer, a Langrois antiquarian and bibliophile. The manuscript contains a life of St. Didier (Desiderius), the patron bishop of Langres, executed in the trompe l’oeil style of late medieval Bruges-Ghent workshops: gilt borders, luminous miniatures, modified textualis script. Royer made it at the turn of the twentieth century. Now held in the Spencer Art Reference Library at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, it is a modern book that performs as a medieval one.

Our argument is that Royer uses the manuscript’s visual programme to stage a particular vision of masculine sanctity. Didier, a Genoan ploughman elected bishop by divine decree and martyred by Vandals outside the city walls, embodies what we call “chaste virility”: physical strength oriented toward humility and sacrifice rather than violence. The miracle of his flowering verge, the decapitation that does not kill him, the bloodied Gospel that remains legible: these episodes, rendered in miniature and border decoration, construct an image of fortitude through endurance. Crucially, Royer depicts Langres as intact, its walls unbreached, even as its bishop is executed outside them.

The manuscript is not simply a saint’s life; it is a homage to the city itself, produced at a moment of genuine anxieties about French sovereignty following the Franco-Prussian War.

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Citation: Virginia Blanton and Jack Walton, “St. Didier’s Flowering Verge and the Rhetoric of Chaste Virility in a Modern Devotional: Joseph Royer’s Homage to Medieval Langres,” Different Visions: New Perspectives on Medieval Art 8 (2022). https://doi.org/10.61302/PMAL4500.