Parergon

We know very little about manuscript illuminators in fifteenth-century England. As Sonja Drimmer observes in her original, provocative book, nearly all are identified as anonymous, shadowy figures we classify according to artistic style. It doesn’t help that art historians have traditionally been more interested in the aesthetic excellence of continental work than in the ‘splendid vulgarity’ (as manuscript curator Janet Backhouse put it) of English art. According to Drimmer, even when illumination is considered, it is often regarded as secondary to the text it illustrates or as mere adornment, an added extra to enhance prestige for an affluent patron.

In her study of vernacular English manuscripts of the fifteenth century, Drimmer turns these assumptions on their heads. The period saw the blossoming of a national vernacular literature by authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and John Lydgate, with the concomitant proliferation of illuminated manuscripts of their work. Drimmer argues for a reevaluation of the agency of illuminators in the creation of this literature, seeing them as no less than essential players in the formation of English literary identity, which she calls both ‘a visual and linguistic event’ (p. 3). She prises illuminators away from subservience to the text on the page, breaking the text/image nexus, casting them as powerful, thinking operators engaged with the broader political culture, ‘assembling, adapting, and combining image types from a range of sources’ (p. 5).

The independence of illuminators is first examined through the visual construction of the poet as auctor. Up to the fifteenth century the manuscript book was considered to be the shared responsibility of the myriad practitioners who constructed the finished book—unlike today, the author did not hold a privileged, primary position. The illuminator was one of these practitioners, operating in loose collaboration but more or less independently. What was different about vernacular literature was that because the manuscripts were newly illustrated, there was no tradition of illustration, which compelled the artists to invent their own compositions.

Drimmer traces the development of the vernacular author portrait, a fascinating exercise at a time when the notion of the authorial identity itself [End Page 253] was fragile and in flux. She finds that Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate are almost never depicted as authors in the act of writing, despite the traditional Evangelist portrait offering a clear precedent for depicting authorship of a work. For example, confused as to the status of Chaucer in relation to his works, the illuminator of the Ellesmere manuscript of The Canterbury Tales (San Marino, Huntingdon Library MS EL 26 C9, c. 1400–05) conflates identities, depicting Chaucer as a pilgrim, as narrator, and as author pointing at the adjacent text, not in the act of writing, but with a penner around his neck.

Illuminators’ inability to represent the idea of the contemporary author is also evident in manuscripts of Gower’s Confessio Amantis; of all the illuminated copies, only one shows him actually composing his work. Like Chaucer’s, Gower’s authorial identity is elusive.

The third author considered by Drimmer is Lydgate, whom she finds less evasive. Fifteen illuminations show him as a Benedictine monk, but in nonauthorial guise, as the manuscripts under consideration are more concerned with paying homage to royal and religious patrons and sponsors, and it is they who appear in illuminations as the primary identities, whether this be Henry V or Saint Edmund. Even when there was no explicit sponsorship, such as in manuscripts of The Siege of Thebes, the author identity is still unstable. For example, in one manuscript Lydgate is depicted not as author but as a pilgrim monk mounted on a horse (London, British Library, Arundel MS 119, fol. 1^r, c. 1425–50)

While illuminators ‘formalized equivocality as the English poet’s defining feature’ (p. 148), Drimmer also argues that they ‘redrafted the terms in...