Iconography and the Professional Reader: The Politics of Book Production in the Douce ‘Piers Plowman.’ by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Denise L. Despres (review)

HUMANITIES 205 Obviously, despite numerous disagreements, I have found Maurer=s book an instructive and provocative read! (MARILYN MCCORD ADAMS) Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Denise L. Despres. Iconography and the Professional Reader: The Politics of Book Production in the Douce >Piers Plowman.= University of Minnesota Press 1999. xviii, 268. US $49.95 This study is a contribution to the lively area of manuscript culture and medieval reception theory. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Denise L. Despres take the only illustrated manuscript of Piers Plowman and subject it to an extensive analysis, interpreting not the text, but its relations with the margins of the page, which are occupied by both illustrations and annotations. Bodleian manuscript Douce 104 contains the C text of Piers Plowman in the Hiberno-English dialect; it was produced in the >Dublin Pale,= the English colony in Ireland in 1427. It has attracted a good deal of interest lately because of its unusual illustrations: seventy-four pictures squeezed into the margins, alongside the text, ranging from primitive little drawings (a hand, a boat), to full-length coloured figures illustrating various speakers within the poem. Often the pictures are lined up so that they appear to be speaking or looking at appropriate bits of the text. They are not grand or expensive; some of them are unfinished, and the whole manuscript is a non-luxurious production, on poor-quality vellum. Why such a manuscript might have been made, and what were the agendas of the scribe, illustrator, and annotator, are questions to which this book attempts to provide answers. Kerby-Fulton takes up the subject of the fifteenth-century scribe, and explores the >visual politics= which may be deduced from his work. She argues convincingly that the main scribe is also responsible for the illustrations , and suggests analogues to the style and habits of illustration in chancery documents such as the Dublin Red Book of the Exchequer. She is able to argue that Douce belongs to a particular circle of clerical-legal professionals, who were used to marginal illustrations as finding devices for items in documents, or as filing cues for documents themselves. She goes on to discuss the verbal annotations in Douce 104; these are written in another hand alongside the poem, sometimes on top of the marginal pictures. She compares these annotations as a whole with those of another manuscript of Piers Plowman (Huntington 143), and shows, interestingly, how the two sets of annotations differ completely in the kinds of things they draw attention to: the Huntington scribe is more literary and less interested in any >political= dimensions of the poem. The second part of the book, >visual heuristics= by Despres, attempts to show how the illustrations work didactically, forming a mnemonic frame- 206 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 work. The images are seen as foci for meditative rumination on the meaning and interconnections within the poem (all this much influenced by the work on meditative memory by Mary Carruthers). The whole book provides an exceptionally stimulating example of the newer, more holistic interpretative methods: every aspect of the manuscript contributes to the discussion, and the interdisciplinary skills of the authors are very impressive. Nevertheless, the interpretation is just that: an interpretation, sometimes perhaps an over-interpretation. The illustrations are of poor quality (figure 1 is impossible), and show only parts of pages. The book attempts to piggyback on Pearsall=s facsimile of Douce 104, but since that is hard to come by, the authors= arguments have to be taken on faith. Kerby-Fulton and Despres often attempt to carry their argument by adjectives: >seductively wavy blond hair,= >shady-looking friar,= >apostolic garment=; and it is only in a footnote that they reveal that the picture they call >the young bastard= throughout is elsewhere called >Cain,= B which would require a radical reordering of sympathy. The rather unnecessary argument that the illustrator is drawing upon the >Ages of Man= iconography confuses two traditions, and Despres=s claim that medieval authors placed the faculty of imagination above reason should be taken with a pinch of salt: imagination was a skittish power, which often led into temptation; it appears as such in at least two morality plays. But the real merit...