MLN 127 Supplement (2012): S217–S242 © 2013 by The Johns Hopkins University Press Interpreting Job’s Silence in the Bible historiale 1 ❦ Jeanette Patterson Who will grant me that my words may be written? Who will grant me that they may be marked down in a book? With an iron pen and in a plate of lead, or else be graven with an instrument in lint stone. For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and in the last day I shall rise out of the earth. Job 19.23–25 2 Foreword In a 1979 special issue of New Literary History, a group of leading medievalists came together to relect on the continued relevance of studying the Middle Ages and the problems of reading its texts from a modern perspective. In response to Paul Zumthor’s and Hans Robert Jauss’s discussion, in the same issue, on the possibility of overcoming 1 A version of this article irst appeared as “Les paroles dont je vous ay fait mention: The Bible historiale’s Two Books of Job” in my dissertation, “Silent Job: Interpretive Frames and the Lay Readership in the Bible historiale,” Johns Hopkins University, 2011. Research was facilitated by the generous support of the Medieval Academy of America Charles T. Wood Dissertation Grant, the French Embassy’s Chateaubriand Fellowship, and a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. I also wish to thank the curatorial staff at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Richelieu and Arsenal), the British Library, the Library of Congress, the Pierpont Morgan Library and the Walters Art Gallery for their assistance. 2 Bible quotations in English are from Douay-Rheims except where I have translated from the Bible historiale. As a translation of the Vulgate, Douay-Rheims is closest to the Bible historiale’s translation and sources used by Christian commentators discussed herein.