Beyond Fidelity: The Illustration of Late Medieval Literary Texts.
- Author/Editor
- Pearsall, Derek.
- Title
- Beyond Fidelity: The Illustration of Late Medieval Literary Texts.
- Published
- Pearsall, Derek. "Beyond Fidelity: The Illustration of Late Medieval Literary Texts." In Tributes to Kathleen L. Scott: English Medieval Manuscripts: Readers, Makers, Illuminators (London: Harvey Miller, 2009), pp. 197-208.
- Review
- Art historians pay less attention to illustrations in literary manuscripts than they do to those in religious texts--psalters, books of hours, bibles, etc. Literary scholars, on the other hand, pay significant attention, but generally focus on connecting the illustration to the text, as an aid to interpretation. Pearsall argues "for more consideration to be given to . . . 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). Illustrators' instructions, sometimes verbal, sometimes sketched out or written in margins (as in the case of "Confessio Amantis" MS Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 902), and often copying generic models, need to be considered (198). The supervisor, the scribe, nor the illustrator may have read the text; illustrations may have been included "to heighten the value of the book as a salable product and an object of prestige to the owner" (198). Various illustrated manuscripts of Chaucerian texts provide most of Pearsall's examples. Pearsall devotes pp. 205-07 primarily to two "pictures that Gower himself seems to have stipulated as the pictorial program for the poem": Amans confessing his sins against Love to Genius, and the Dream of Nebuchadnezzar. "So what we have in the 'Confessio' is an authorial program of illustration designed to articulate the moral and formal design of the poem" (206). His examples are taken from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 294 and various versions of Nebuchadnezzar noted by Gareth Spriggs (q.v.). MS Bodley 902, with its white-bearded Amans, is exceptional, in that it "gives the game away" (206). Pearsall notes that the same picture appears in Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 307, though this "is a reversed copy of the Bodley picture, and therefore not an independently idiosyncratic choice but a mere production economy" (206). In his closing remarks, Pearsall comments without elaborating that "pictures may, as in certain manuscripts of the 'Confessio Amantis,' insist on a programmatic reading of a text which the text itself may not seem to carry through" (208). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2]
- Date
- 2009
- Gower Subjects
- Manuscripts and Textual Studies
Confessio Amantis