Fair and Varied Forms: Visual Textuality in Medieval Illustrated Manuscripts(Studies in Medieval History and Culture)

This book examines the relationship between words and images in illustrated texts. The focus is on cultural attitudes toward illustrations and the idea that one might consider graphic material other than writing as text and text as graphics. This aspect of books and manuscripts has often been ignored by literary critics and the vocabulary for discussing it is often inadequate. The author has established a theoretical basis that would be useful for any graphic production that combines words and pictures and has applied this to medieval illustrated manuscripts. The study deals with four manuscripts - three from the Anglo-Saxon period and one from the fourteenth century. Three reading strategies are applied to both verbal and Pictorial parts of the texts. The first, reading schemata, is normally used for pictorial material; the second, reading metaphoric tropes, is normally applied to verbal material; the third, reading the spatial construction of ideas, is comparatively neutral. This study shows that one can indeed read both verbal and pictorial texts by means of these three strategies. Moreover, the kinds of readings generated by these strategies reveal that there is no stable relationship between words and their illustrations, but that the relationship changes according to the material itself.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations -- Preface -- Introduction -- CHAPTER ONE -- Graphic Signification -- Perception and Corwepnun -- Potency of Images and Words -- Modes of Interaction and Substitution: Metaphoric Tropes -- Structure in the Graphic Field -- Contexts -- CHAPTER TWO -- Inner Space, Outer Space, Graphic Space: Words and Picture; in Anglo-Saxon Culture -- The Print-culture Bias -- Anglo-Saxon Attitudes toward Scribes, Illustrators, and the Visual -- Anglo-Saxon Readers and Writers -- Anglo-Saxon Artisans -- Image Veneration -- Anglo-Saxon Illustrated hooks -- Patterns of Identification: Schemata -- Patterns of Interaction and Substitution: Metaphoric Tropes -- Patterns of Relationship: Spatial Models -- Images of Time -- Time and Space on the Manuscript Page -- CHAPTER THREE -- The Reading Subject and the Devotional Text: The Harley Psalter -- The Manuscript -- The Psalms in Anglo-Saxon Life -- Purpose of the Harley Psalter -- Psalm 33 -- Psalm I -- Psalm 113 -- Patterns of Relationship: Cosmic Space -- Patterns of Identification: Schematizarion and the Representation of Xmen -- The Political Nature of the Psalter -- Patterns of Interaction and Substitution: More on Metaphor -- CHAPTER FOUR -- Narratise Time in Graphic Space: The Illustrated Hexateuch -- The stanuscript -- Patterns of Identification: Schemata -- Patterns of Interaction and Substitution: Metaphoric Tropes -- Patterns of Relationship: Movement in Narrative Space -- Spatial Time -- Allegorical lime -- CHAPTER FIVBE -- My Monster, Myself: The Mantels of the Last -- The Manuscript -- The Monstrous Races -- Patterns of Ideiuification: Schematic Monsters -- Patterns of Interaction and Substitution: Dog-Ants and Valkyry-eyed Beasts -- Patterns of Relationship: Occupying the Framed Space -- CHAPTER SIX -- Marginal Portraits and the Fiction of Orality: -- The Ellesmere Manuscript -- Changes in the Making and Reading of Texts Since the Eleventh Century -- Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales -- Patterns of Relationship: Page Layout and the Reader -- Modes of Identification: Schemata and Discursive Detail -- Patterns of Substitution and Interaction: Metonymic Focus on Orality -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Author Index -- Subject Index.