Bible of St Louis

The Bible of St Louis, also called the Rich Bible of Toledo or simply the Toledo Bible, is a Bible moralisée in three volumes, made between 1226 and 1234 for King Louis IX of France (b. 1214) at the request of his mother Blanche of Castile.^[1] It is an illuminated manuscript that contains selections of the text of the Bible, along with a commentary and illustrations. Each page pairs Old and New Testament episodes with illustrations explaining their moral significance in terms of typology. Every excerpt of the Bible is illustrated with two miniatures. The first shows a representation of the text fragment as such, the second shows a theological or an allegorical scene explaining the text fragment in the light of the teachings of the Church. The miniatures are accompanied by the Bible text and by a short comment on the typological relationship between the two images.

Like other similar works, the book does not contain the full text of the Bible and is, despite its name, actually not a real Bible. The work would have served for the training of the young king. The manuscript has been kept for the past eight centuries in the Cathedral of Toledo, except for a fragment of eight leaves which is now in the Morgan Library & Museum in New York as MS M240.