The miniature of the eschatological banquet of the Just in paradise pictured at the end of the Ambrosian Bible is read here through the lens of a cultural history or histoire des mentalités. The banquet motif is interpreted as a symbolic representation of transcendent order, by means of a bricolage of preexisting images and iconographies of social order. Ultimately, the eschatological setting of the aristocratic banquet involves a polemical critique of a society that excluded Jews, and a vision of the courtly, exclusionary hierarchies of aristocratic Europe subverted.
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