Introduction: The Role of Graphic Devices in Understanding the Early Decorated Book

Summary

The study of illuminated manuscripts has grown steadily since the staging by Sir Sydney Carlyle Cockerell of the first exhibition devoted to them, held at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in London in 1908. That exhibition stemmed from Cockerell’s background as a collector, curator and connoisseur, in a tradition that stretched back to his time assisting John Ruskin, and indeed beyond, to the post-Reformation period, when the bibliophiles Archbishop Matthew Parker and Sir Robert Cotton initiated revived appreciation of the manuscripts’ aesthetic appeal. Illumination has accordingly entered the canon of art-historical studies, but has often teetered uneasily on the cusp between the fine and decorative arts. Figural narrative and established iconographies were the principal areas of interest at first – effectively, viewing illuminations as paintings in miniature. Meanwhile, study of the texts contained in such books continued apace, and the work of deciphering them through the formal and typological analysis of their scripts (palaeography) commenced in earnest with the publication of Jean Mabillon’s De re diplomatica in 1681. An appreciation of the significance of the manuscripts’ physical construction was inaugurated by Bernard de Montfaucon in his Palaeographia graeca of 1708 and elevated to disciplinary status as ‘codicology’ with the work of scholars such as Destrez and Delaissé during the mid-twentieth century.

In recent decades, a more holistic approach has evolved, with scholars collaborating or ranging across these disciplines to form a more rounded view of the socio-historical context of such complex artefacts, and with the establishment of book history as a new arrow in the quiver of academe. A fuller appreciation has also grown of the sophisticated and complex ways in which text and image inter-relate, and of the essential roles of navigation, articulation and interpretation played by what has traditionally been seen – sometimes rather pejoratively – as ‘decoration’, whether major or minor. The application of neuropsychological and cognitive theories to the exploration of medieval art has also rendered us more receptive to the semiotics and symbolism of abstract graphic forms and to the artistic interplay between iconic and aniconic, figurative and abstract. The cognitive strategies of the medievals themselves have also been examined through the application of their own early tools, such as exegesis, allegory, tropology, typology and multivalence.