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Just a few days ago, while visiting an Alabama church, whose residents were recovering from recent tornadoes, President Trump raised eyebrows by signing (at their request) the Bibles of some of the parishioners. His supporters loved it and others thought it all a bit odd. And indeed, as the original piece in The Washington Post noted and then the Associated Press later reported, there's precedent for presidents signing Bibles in specific instances.
But there's a longer precedent at work too, one that goes all the way back to the European Middle Ages. This is a precedent that intimately connects the Bible (as a bound book) and the owners of those Bibles to political leaders. In other words, some people have wanted rulers to "sign" their Bibles for around 1,200 years .
The practice of producing biblical books for rulers was relatively common in the early Middle Ages. There are dozens of these Bibles from the 9th, 10th, and 11th centuries with images of the rulers for whom the books were intended.
Take, for example, the Gospel Book produced somewhere in northern France precisely to 870 CE (the 2 scribes name themselves and the date at the end of the manuscript) but it was later gifted to the the abbey of St. Emmeram in Regensburg at the end of the 9th century. This is known as the Codex Aureus of Saint Emmeram - the "Book of Gold."
Just 5 pages in, we see the image below - but in blazing, garish color. This picture of King Charles the Bald (yes, his real name) appears just after a written prologue to the 4 Gospels, even before the text properly begins. Here he is enthroned, the hand of God visible above him, flanked by angels, surrounded by personifications of the lands he's conquered. Taken together, this imagery is of a 9th-century ruler framed as a modern day incarnation of a biblical king. But a king very much connected to this Bible. The text (not easily visible in the image here) claims Charles as its patron, a fact emphasized in that the book when completed was almost certainly sent directly to him for his approval, for his (if you will) "signature."
But why?
The King Charles the Bald ruled from 840-877 CE. The grandson of the great Charlemagne, son of Louis the Pious, Charles and his brothers saw - and caused - the Carolingian empire splinter into pieces. Civil war raged. Poets lamented in biblical terms the horrors they saw. Civilization as they knew it seemed to be falling apart.
But as political unity broke down, culture continued. The monasteries of the empire produced gorgeous works of art - illuminated manuscripts that are still stunning to behold. And unsurprisingly, given where they were produced, given the way in which they lamented their own times (harking back to the Israelites) many of these books were Bibles.
Those books connected the ruler to those that produced them, as well as where the books finally ended up. The reason they did this, the reason they needed those books with those images of their rulers, is because that connection meant something. It drew the book owner/ creator and the ruler together by creating an object related to that materialized that relationship. Maybe more importantly though, that "signed" book also drew a link between past and present - a connection between biblical history and their modern world.
And in the late 9th century, as the empire splintered and civil war raged, as the Vikings invaded, in a world in which everything seemed to be falling apart, that connection seemed to reveal a surety about the ruler's relationship to God that gave them some much-needed comfort.
And in the end, that sense of dislocation of worry about a world falling apart, a desire to bring the past back to life in the present; these were reasons enough to ask a ruler to "sign" their Bible - in the 9th century and perhaps in the 21st.
