'Sweet in the mouth, Bitter in the Belly': Seeing double in an eccentric french renaissance book of hours

This essay introduces and interprets a singular sixteenthcentury French Book of Hours (made probably by Noël Bellemare for Jean Lallemant le Jeune) in which fairly standard iconographic scenes are present but the fi gures appear to be lacking. Questioning whether these images ask the viewer to inhabit the space imaginatively, by projection, or to reconstitute the image internally, the essay suggests a number of analogous image types that can help us understand the practices of 'double vision' that such images might have assumed and elicited. It argues in the end that the status of these fi gureless images changes over the pages of the manuscript to convey a message that, like the book John the Evangelist was forced to eat on Patmos, is 'sweet in the mouth, bitter in the belly'.