Sonja Drimmer's The Art of Allusion is a welcome addition to the field of late-medieval English manuscript studies. Ambitious, well-organized, cogently argued, it both energizes and revises earlier scholarly approaches to its subject.
The book's premise explores how illuminators devised new images through referential techniques--assembling, adapting, and combining inspiration from a range of sources at the moment the English vernacular literary canon was forming. Moreover, as Drimmer notes in her introduction, "This study is founded on the premise that illuminators were integral participants in the production of literary culture" (14). She stresses repeatedly that they worked in tandem with, but at a 'chronological' remove from, the authors whose works they coproduced. Drimmer's temporal focus begins in 1403, the year scribes and illuminators merged to found what came to be called the Stationers' Company, and extends to 1476, the year Caxton set up the first printing press in England. The volume is handsomely illustrated with over a hundred images, twenty-seven of which come in the form of colored plates. Thorough in its notations, the book also boasts a largely comprehensive bibliography.
The study is divided into three parts. The first part treats the makers of manuscripts--namely, illuminators and scribes. Drimmer suggests that illuminators were intrinsic participants in the production of English literary culture via their role in the book trade. The second section treats representations of authors. Here, Drimmer grapples with issues of authorial status and canon formation as she traces extant representations of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate in their works. The third and final section is devoted to two separate case studies of manuscripts with illustrations of historical narratives. Here, Drimmer traces the interplay between the depiction of historical narratives and the political tensions of the moments in which they were produced. In this section, Drimmer suggests a relationship between the emergence of narrative cycles in vernacular manuscripts and national history.
Her introduction establishes the book's focus on manuscripts featuring work by Lydgate, Chaucer and Gower. Drimmer demonstrates how these books and their author portraits are 'of their moment' and thus different from, for example, the early Insular author portraits that precede them. Further, she explains that, as the fifteenth century progressed, the ever-enlarging scale of vernacular manuscript production generated a demand for new images--images that, moreover, needed to accompany narratives that had no tradition of illustration. As she asserts, "many of these manuscripts contain images that were integral to the rising prestige of English as a literary language [yet their illuminators] are seldom discussed in the major narratives of [English literary culture's] development" (3). As such, Drimmer contends, illumination both responded to and contributed to the entry and circulation of new ideas about English literary authorship, political history, and book production. Provocatively, she asserts: "My aim is not to devise a theory of literary illustration drawn from English texts; rather, I reverse this operation by examining how images think about English literature" (4). In this, she echoes to an extent W. J. T. Mitchell, who profoundly challenged what is often deemed picture theory by asking "What do pictures want?" As far as theorization of the image is concerned, Drimmer stays close to medieval studies, though. She draws repeatedly on the work of scholars such as Jeffrey Hamburger and Mary Carruthers, among others. This is not a criticism; one of the strengths of this work is its focus on the literary and cultural climate of the era that produced the books she considers. Over all, the introduction should be of particular interest to those interested in issues of center-versus-margin dynamics; in effect, she argues that illuminators, a group at times overlooked or marginalized by scholars who study the early book trade, played a more central role than they have traditionally been granted.
Chapter 1 explores the professional conditions of manuscript illumination in late medieval London. This is not a mere re-hashing of earlier scholarship; of particular note here, Drimmer offers a revision of the number of manuscripts that can be attributed to William Abell. She also offers comments on the changing nature of specialization in the London-based manuscript trade and on how clerks' drawings fit into the repertoire of textual decoration in the fifteenth century.
Chapter 2 commences a multi-chapter discussion of the 'invention' of the vernacular author. Here, Drimmer poses a seemingly simple question--Who is Geoffrey Chaucer? Then she weaves a complex response that encourages the reader to consider him not as an established force in a robust vernacular tradition, but rather as a novel literary entity in an era before his authorial reputation was completely solidified. In short, she examines Chaucer as an illuminator of his manuscripts tasked with conceiving his early author portraits must have done. This is a particularly notable exercise in analysis, and Drimmer uses her chapter's central question as an opportunity to ponder how illuminators responded to the challenges presented by the emerging concept of a contemporary English poet at a time when to be a professional writer in such a capacity was in its nascent stages.
Chapter 3 turns then to the pictorial identity of John Gower and Chapter 4 to that of John Lydgate. Each of these makes a fine stand-alone case study; as a group, the chapters in this section help to both clarify and, in some regards, complicate Drimmer's study's central concerns in turn. Drimmer herself acknowledges this; in her chapter on Lydgate, she discusses a 'paradox' of Lydgate's successful self-promotion through images that show Lydgate as a religious devotee rather than author.
The following two chapters move beyond illuminators' considerations of the concept of the author and authorship. Drimmer here examines two manuscripts made for royal patrons during the Wars of the Roses to examine the relationship between politics and the establishment of a vernacular literary canon in England. The first of these two chapters treats, again, Lydgate--specifically a manuscript of his Troy Book (London, British Library Royal MS 18 D ii). She argues that this often overlooked manuscript collects an exhibition of historical images that might have been intended to serve as a guide for its patron in fashioning his public identity. The chapter is thought-provoking, though matters are somewhat complicated by virtue of the fact that it is not clear which king its patrons sought to court. The final chapter considers the Morgan Confessio. The result is, again, thought-provoking, and one cannot, perhaps, help but leave these exercises considering more seriously how sophisticated some English illuminators were in their navigation of patron and politics. For Drimmer, manuscript illumination is ultimately a political act.
Drimmer's book is a difficult one to summarize precisely; throughout she considers how illuminators treated audiences' respect for authorship (or lack thereof). The book encourages the reader to remember that the status of English vernacular authors was, at the time their works began to proliferate, a very different thing than it is today. In this regard, Drimmer presents an alternative narrative of literary canonization--a narrative in which illuminators play a profound and meaningful role in shaping the way a reading 'public' thought about the men of letters behind the words on the page. It is, for this reason, all the more valuable that she considers, in her epilogue, why there are no manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales with narrative illumination. That is, given one of her pervasive concerns--that illuminators were integral to the rising prestige of English verse and were a force in shaping the status of the English canon--then how could so rich a collection of stories not have inspired the creation of narrative picture cycles? Of course, to answer such a question is a largely impossible task--but her treatment of the question is far from fruitless. For Drimmer, an illustration of the content of each tale could not, given the status of illumination in England at this time, have achieved the "idiosyncratic inflection" of the pilgrim who recounted it (230). It is an answer that, if not wholly satisfactory, is nonetheless in keeping with the thrust of her argument. That the illuminators' role in shaping the emergence of a canon of vernacular English literature is not always primary, or even clear to us in retrospect, does not change the fact that they worked beside the poets and scribes who have typically received the lion's share of credit from later generations of historians.
If one quibble might be offered, and a minor one at that, there is an issue with audience. Some sections of the text would be at home in the hands of an advanced undergraduate--indeed, much of her language is precise and her prose is, with some exceptions, straightforward and readable. Yet other sections seem intended mostly for keen specialists of the material--namely, for a cross-section of literary scholars and art historians who specialize in precisely the period and precisely the group of English literati whose manuscripts she treats. However, to some, this is not a criticism at all, but a strength.
Indeed, Drimmer is remarkably comfortable with the case-study approach that shapes so much of her argument. She writes as a proponent of the idea that images--even seemingly simple images—are complicated things; we, in the modern world, may at times want them to communicate clearly via distinct intentions, but they do not. Her work will be remembered because of its contribution to the field of late-medieval manuscript studies; it should be read more broadly, though, by the wider field of art historians who continue to pursue new means of understanding the interplay between the visual and the textual.
In sum, Drimmer's contribution to art history here is robust. Throughout her study, she claims as her territory manuscripts illustrating major fifteenth-century vernacular literary works that have, in the past, been more or less specifically discussed from a literary perspective. She declares time and again that art historians do these manuscripts and the field of late-medieval manuscript studies a disservice by, in effect, letting literary scholars have all of the fun. As she shows, there is much to these manuscripts for art historical inquiry, and she contributes to separate but interrelated scholarly fields. Her book is a thorough art historical study that manages a feat of noteworthy interdisciplinarity through its marriage with textual studies.