The Book of Signs: Writing and visual difference in Gothic manuscript illumination

Abstract

Abstract I. THE BOOK OPENED The dynamic experience of the medieval book as its layers of skin unfold ‘flesh side’ to ‘hair side’, recto to verso - each opening a verbal and visual revelation ordered for the viewer's gaze - is nowhere more evident than in manuscripts of the Book of Revelation itself, written ‘o show unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass’ (Rev. I. I.). As we move through the great mid thirteenth-century English Apocalypse in Trinity College Library, Cambridge, 1 Cambridge, Trinity College MS R. I6. 2. Facsimiles available in M. R. James, The Trinity College Apocalypse (London: Roxburghe Club, I909), and in The Trinity College Apocalypse, introduction by P. Brieger, transcription and translation by M. Dulong, (London: Evgrammia Press, I967). our eyes are attuned to the integration of text and picture to such an extent that when we come to the beginning of Chapter 10 on fol. 10v, where the picture appears at the bottom of the page, there is no need to look up at the text an...