Iconography and the professional reader

by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton

Oxford Bodleian Library Douce 104 is the only extant manuscript of William Langland's fourteenth-century poem Piers Plowman that is both illustrated and annotated, thereby 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. A study of great significance for medieval scholars, 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.