MS. Barlow 53 (R)

A narrative and genealogical history from the Creation, which takes as its focus the descent of Christ from Adam

The text ends imperfectly in the time of Julius Caesar

According to the prologue, Peter of Poitiers composed the Compendium in order to help his students to learn biblical history, both because he viewed it as lengthy and difficult and because his students lacked access to the necessary books (see Jennifer Shurville, 'Visions of Order and Apocalypse: Text and Image in Thirteenth-century Vercelli' [2018] p. 44)

In an obituary written for Peter of Poitiers, Alberic de Trois-Fontaines (d. 1251) states that Peter consulted poor clerics about the best format for his work and then decided to paint the history of the bible on skins ('in pellibus depingere') (Shurville, 'Visions of Order and Apocalypse', pp. 44-45)

Scholars have understood 'painted on skins' to mean rolls and have argued that Peter designed the work for presentation in roll format (rather than as a codex) so that it could be hung on the wall as a didactic aid to assist the (poor) students mentioned in the prologue. Philip Moore argues that Peter of Poitiers invented the idea of hanging biblical genealogies on classroom walls, citing this as evidence 'that visual education was not unknown in the twelfth century' (The Works of Peter of Poitiers, Master in Theology and Chancellor of Paris (1193-1205) (1936), pp. 7 and 172). Building on Moore's assertion, Zuleika Murat states that the scrolls are often very damaged at the top and takes this as evidence that they were attached to walls ('The Compendium historiae in Genealogia Christi and its Iconographical Tradition: Legacy of Classical Antiquity in a Mediaeval Biblical Anthology', Actual Problems of Theory and History of Art, 5 [2015], p. 405).

However, Sonja Drimmer has revisited these assumptions, noting that the supposition that the rolls were designed to be displayed on classroom walls comes from the eighteenth-century antiquarian Jean Lebeuf. Drimmer comments: 'I know of no twelfth- or thirteenth-century evidence for this practice beyond the display of mappamundi in monastic and, later, domestic, contexts. Certainly, my inability to find evidence for the practice does not rule it out; however, I am disinclined to take the eighteenth-century antiquarian’s word for it' (Drimmer, 'The Rollodex: An Experiment around the Prepositional Paradigm through Peter of Poitiers’s Genealogia Christi', The Journal of the Walters Art Museum (2023)