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This sixteenth-century panel-stamped binding features two Old Testament women celebrated for saving the Israelite people by killing powerful men. Jael, shown on the upper cover, is about to drive a tent peg into the temple of the sleeping Canaanite leader, Sisera, with a carpenter’s mallet. Judith, on the lower cover, raises a sword in a similar gesture against the Assyrian general, Holofernes. 

Jael and Judith were regularly paired together in bindings as well as other works of art in the Reformation period. Catholics and Protestants alike viewed them as symbols of the violent overthrow of heresy by orthodoxy, but they could also stand more generally for the virtue of courage.