Title: Iconography and the professional reader
First published: 1999
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.
Subjects: Appreciation, Authors and readers, Bodleian Library, Book industries and trade, Books and reading, Christian poetry, English (Middle), History, Illumination of books and manuscripts, Medieval, Illustrations, Manuscripts, Medieval Illumination of books and manuscripts, Illumination of books and manuscripts, Book industries and trade, history, Christian poetry, history and criticism, Manuscripts, English (Middle)
Places: Ireland
People: English (Middle) Manuscripts, William Langland (1330?-1400?)
Time periods: To 1500
LC classification: PR2017.I37 K47 1999