Iconography and the professional reader
Subtitle: the politics of book production in the Douce Piers Plowman
By: Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Denise L. Despres.
Contributors: Despres, Denise Louise, 1958-
Series: Medieval cultures ;; v. 15
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 1999
Place of publication: Minneapolis
Language: eng
Number of pages: 268
Subjects: Langland, William, 1330?-1400? -- Illustrations.; Langland, William, 1330?-1400? -- Appreciation -- Ireland.; Langland, William, 1330?-1400? -- Manuscripts.; Manuscripts, English (Middle) -- Ireland.; Bodleian Library.; Illumination of books and manuscripts, Medieval -- Ireland.; Book industries and trade -- Ireland -- History -- To 1500.; Christian poetry, English (Middle) -- Illustrations.; Authors and readers -- Ireland -- History -- To 1500.; Books and reading -- Ireland -- History -- To 1500.
Description: 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 205-252)  and index.