Beyond Fidelity: The Illustration of Late Medieval English Literary Texts.

Author/Editor
Pearsall, Derek. "Beyond Fidelity: The Illustration of Late Medieval English Literary Texts." In Marlene Villalobos Hennessey, ed. Tributes to Kathleen L. Scott: English Medieval Manuscripts: Readers, Makers and Illuminators. London: Miller, 2009. Pp. 197-220.

Title
Beyond Fidelity: The Illustration of Late Medieval English Literary Texts.

Published
Pearsall, Derek.

Review
Pearsall's concern is the "comparative neglect of vernacular text illustration by art historians" and the attention paid by literary scholars primarily to the relation of words to image, "as if the significance of the image began and ended in its fidelity to the text" (197). Here he presses instead for "more consideration to be given to two other factors: the importance of the idea of the book (rather than the text) in the choice and disposition of illustrations; and the possibility that pictures may have their own significance, deriving from their own historical apparatus of visual convention, that may go beyond or against the grain of or contradict or have nothing to do with the texts they illustrate" (197). Often, illustrators had constraints put upon them by supervisors--an example being Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 902, a manuscript of Gower's "Confessio Amantis," where "clearly written in the margin of fol. 8 beside where the picture is now: Hie fiat confessor/ sedens & confessus coram se genufiectendo" (197). Pearsall for the most part takes examples from manuscripts of Chaucer's works, but concludes with further discussion of Bodley MS 902, in particular the confession miniature which portrays Amans as an old man, in company with Genius. This shows, Pearsall argues, that "someone, whether the artist or the person who gave him his instructions, had evidently read enough of the poem to know of this startling dramatic revelation [i.e., that Amans is old] and chose the literal truth rather than the literary subterfuge which drives the narrative of the poem. It is fidelity to the text of an extraordinary kind, fidelity to the text which actually gives the game away, and ruinously anticipates the moment upon which the poem depends for its moral impact. It is a very odd picture, and unique" (206). Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 307, fol. 9 has the same picture, "but this is reversed copy of the Bodley picture and therefore not an independently idiosyncratic choice but a mere production economy" (206). [RFY. Copyright, John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1]

Date
2009

Gower Subjects
Background and General Criticism
Manuscripts and Textual Studies
Confession Amantis