Fair and Varied Forms - Visual Textuality in Medieval Illustrated Manuscripts (Hardcover)

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.
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.