St. Didier's Flowering Verge and the Rhetoric of Chaste Virility in a Modern Devotional

Type: Peer-reviewed article (summary — full text at the publisher)
Publication: Different Visions: New Perspectives on Medieval Art, Volume 8
Year: 2022
Authors: Virginia Blanton and Jack Walton (University of Missouri–Kansas City)

Joseph Royer made this book in 1902, but everything about it — the trompe l’oeil borders of flowers and insects, the modified textualis script, the pictorial cycle of a saint’s martyrdom — belongs to the fifteenth century. We read that anachronism as an argument.

The article traces Royer’s sources through three earlier lives of Didier, in Latin, French, and Italian, and then reads the manuscript’s images against them. Our central claim is that Didier functions as a metonym for Langres itself. The saint is martyred outside walls that Royer paints as unbreached, so a story about a bishop who fails to save his city becomes a story about a city that cannot fall. Supporting that reading is a sustained visual rhetoric of chaste virility: the castrated ox that dominates the ploughman miniature, the cinched monastic waistline, and the flowering verge — a word that means both “rod” and “penis,” and whose almond blossoms and drupes Royer renders with a naturalist’s precision.

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