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Iconography and the Professional Reader The Politics of Book Production in the Douce Piers Plowman Kathryn Kerby-Fulton |
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Oxford Bodleian Library Douce 104 is the only extant manuscript of William Langland's fourteenth-century work Piers Plowman that is both illustrated and annotated, providing material evidence of interpretation by professional readers--the artists, scribes, and annotators who constructed the work's meaning in an early fifteenth-century Anglo-Irish colonial context. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Denise L. Despres examine this evidence for what it can tell us about the politics of late-medieval manuscript preparation and the scholarly direction of manuscript use. Kerby-Fulton and Despres reconstruct, in vital detail, the lineaments of the community of professional readers and the pressures that produced it. And they show us the roles played by the manuscript's production team-scribe, illustrator, annotator, rubricator, and even an elusive commissioning patron--as all involved in the act of reading and interpreting: a picture that brings to life the ideologies and rivalries that affected bookshop practices. At the center of this picture is the Anglo-Irish scribal-illustrator of Douce 104, probably a clerk with Exchequer training working in the Dublin-Pale region of colonial Ireland. The authors reflect on the ways in which his experience with utility-grade legal, devotional, historical, and religious manuscripts, as well as the illustrated works of Giraldus Cambrensis and a fragmentary Anglo-Irish tradition, influenced his iconographic program and presentation of visionary experience. A work of great significance for medieval studies, Iconography and the Professional Reader forcefully argues the importance of professional readers and utility-grade manuscripts in comprehending the meditative, mnemonic, performative, and subversive nature of late-medieval reading. "This is one of those books whose style reveals plainly the enjoyment that research for it gave, and the enthusiasm of the authors for its subject." —Medium Aevum "Exhaustively informative and methodologically sound. The book abounds with examples of how 'professional' readers meditated and altered the text to suit either their own needs or those of their perceived audience. The book is useful as a working model of how to 'read from the margins'-how a reader-response study might work on one specific manuscript." —Comitatus "In their challenging and fruitful new approach to Piers Plowman, Kerby-Fulton and Despres present us with an exemplary work of socially engaged textual criticism." —Journal of Religion Kathryn Kerby-Fulton is professor of English at the University of Victoria and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University. Denise L. Despres is professor of English and humanities at the University of Puget Sound. 304 pages | 70 black-and-white photos, 7 figures | 5 7/8 x 9 | 1998 |
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$60.00 Cloth/jacket