She offers an important revision of the reading of the Ruthwell Cross, which changes radically the interpretation of the Cross as a whole. Among the manuscripts examined here are the Caedmon, Auchinleck, Vernon and Pearl manuscripts. Hilmo's thesis is not confined to overtly religious texts and images, but deals also with historical writing, such as Layamon's Brut, and with poetry designed ostensibly for entertainment, such as the Canterbury Tales. This study demonstrates how the visual and the verbal interactively manifest the real "text" of each illustrated literary work. The artistic elements place vernacular works within a larger iconographic framework in which human composition is seen to relate to the activities of the divine Author and Artificer. Whether iconic or anti-iconic in stance, images, by their nature, were a potent means of influencing the way an English author's words, accessible in the vernacular, were thought about and understood within the context of the theology of the Incarnation that informed them and governed their aesthetic of spiritual function.
This is the first study to cover the range of illustrated English poems from the Anglo-Saxon period to the early 15th century.
Share This Book: