Fair and Varied Forms Book

This book examines the relationship between words and images in illustrated texts. The focus is on cultural attitudes toward illustrations and the idea that one might consider graphic material other than writing as text and text as graphics. This aspect of books and manuscripts has often been ignored by literary critics and the vocabulary for discussing it is often inadequate. The author has established a theoretical basis that would be useful for any graphic production that combines words and pictures and has applied this to medieval illustrated manuscripts. The study deals with four manuscripts - three from the Anglo-Saxon period and one from the fourteenth century. Three reading strategies are applied to both verbal and Pictorial parts of the texts. The first, reading schemata, is normally used for pictorial material; the second, reading metaphoric tropes, is normally applied to verbal material; the third, reading the spatial construction of ideas, is comparatively neutral. This study shows that one can indeed read both verbal and pictorial texts by means of these three strategies. Moreover, the kinds of readings generated by these strategies reveal that there is no stable relationship between words and their illustrations, but that the relationship changes according to the material itself.Read More