Fair and Varied Forms: Visual Textuality in Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts

✍ Scribed by Mary C. Olson

Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2003
Tongue: English
Leaves: 262
Series: Studies in Medieval History and Culture, 15
Category: Library

No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.

✦ Synopsis

Transferred to Digital Printing 2009.

The ideas that have come to fruition in this book began long before I began work on my Ph.D. dissertation at Purdue University. The almost fifteen years when I made my living as a graphic artist established ways of thinking about texts as visual elements that interact with pictures to generate meanings beyond the literal sense of the words. I believe that it is perhaps only in advertising art today that we find the same level of awareness of the appearance of text and the importance of letter forms that was the everyday attitude of scribes and illustrators in the Middle Ages. This awareness has helped me to look at illustrated manuscripts from the point of view of the scribe and illustrator, to better understand the use of schemata and iconography, and to understand spatial arrangement of elements in the graphic field as part of the meaning generated by the page.

✦ Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction
Chapter One: Graphic Signification
Perception and Conception
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 Pictures 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 Books
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 1
Psalm 113
Patterns of Relationship: Cosmic Space
Patterns of Identification: Schematization and the Representation of Women
The Political Nature of the Psalter
Patterns of Interaction and Substitution: More on Metaphor
Chapter Four: Narrative Time in Graphic Space: The Illustrated Hexateuch
The Manuscript
Patterns of Identification: Schemata
Patterns of Interaction and Substitution: Metaphoric Tropes
Patterns of Relationship: Movement in Narrative Space
Spatial Time
Allegorical Time
Chapter Five: My Monster, Myself: 'The Marvels of the East'
The Manuscript
The Monstrous Races
Patterns of Identification: 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

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