In her provocative and stimulating The Art of Allusion, Sonja Drimmer argues for the significance of manuscript illuminators as dynamic participants in the spread and interpretation of the vernacular English literature in the fifteenth century. Specifically, Drimmer offers the first book-length study to consider the “emergence of England's literary canon as a visual and linguistic event” (3), arguing that the increased scale of vernacular literary production led to not only a demand for new images but the need to communicate new concepts and ideas, essentially the establishment of a new tradition of illustration. Furthermore, she argues that the model for image production in this period “recalls the strategies of literary production” assumed by authors like Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and John Lydgate. Image production is predominantly allusive (5) and positions the illuminator in refreshing relation to the scribe, author, and translator as equally involved in practices of adoption and adaptation. Drimmer's temporal focus is the period that begins with the establishment of the Stationer's Company by scribes and illuminators and closes, around 1476, with the founding of Caxton's press, events that bookend an explosion in the production and circulation of vernacular literary texts; moreover the cultural output of this period is often heavily marked by the political maneuverings and bloody encounters of the Wars of the Roses.

Of course, manuscript illumination has been the topic of some important scholarship, especially over the course of the last century, but Drimmer aims to “channel conversations about English literary illustration away from the topic of textual and visual interchange” (10) that has dominated work in the past, away from the tendency of literary scholars to read the manuscript image in relation to the text only. Nor does Drimmer align her work too closely with that of art historians, who, she says, tend to overlook secular manuscript illuminations due to their lack of sophistication and “visual potency” (11), though she is heavily influenced by theories of visual translation. Her marshalling of the methods associated with the history of art, manuscript studies, and literary criticism is textured by, on the one hand, an insistence that illuminations from this period constitute responses to “vernacular literary culture at large rather than from exclusively the text at hand” (12–13) and, on the other, a recognition that the tactics of illuminators may be aligned with those of the poet, but not in way that suggests an intertexual relationship. It needs to be possible that the “illuminator's tactics transcend the word on the page” (13).

In her introduction, Drimmer ably outlines what is a very specific position in relation to a series of wider concerns and complexities, as well as indicating the way in which the volume will proceed: its six chapters (in three sections) sweep through considerations of the makers of manuscripts—illuminators and scribes—to representations of the makers of the texts they contain—authors—to a narrower focus on two manuscript case studies and their illuminated narratives. The first chapter, an essay on limners and illumination, combines evidence from manuscript images—which survive in greater number from 1403 onwards alongside Middle English texts—with evidence from account books and inventories in order to identify the “peculiarities of their profession that bore on how these manuscripts emerged, developed, and ultimately produced meaning” (23). This chapter is packed with fine detail, examining in particular the dynamic between limner and scribe in this period. The next three chapters are concerned with the challenges presented to the work of the illuminator by the emerging concept of the contemporary author. Devoted to Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate respectively, Drimmer's essays here center on the pictorial identity of the authors. “Chaucer's Manicule” examines the five different images of the poet in manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales, finding in them a program of indecision with respect of authorial identity on the part of the illuminators. Chapter 3, “Gower in Humilitatio,” is concerned with the illustrations that accompany manuscript versions of the Confessio Amantis, which include those of the lover as he kneels to make his confession, not explicitly intended to be an accurate representation of Gower. However, illuminators variously depict Amans as a young or old man, or at times as a figure that might be read as a depiction of the poet himself. This chapter includes the well-known miniature in Bodleian Library MS Bodley 294, depicting a young Amans in an image reminiscent of illuminations accompanying the Roman de la Rose. Pictorial representations of Lydgate, the topic of the fourth chapter, tend to be consistent, and as an author he has “much more substance in the manuscript corpus of his own poetry” (114). Drimmer's reading of these images, which have occasioned little critical analysis, turns on the tension between Lydgate's relation to his own work as “extraliterary” and how the images “equivocate on his relationship to the poetry he authored,” operating as votive (114–15).

The final chapters swerve slightly from direct concerns about authors and authorship to show how illuminators made imagery that was relevant for audiences in other contexts, finding that in imagery in manuscripts that were made for royal patrons there is a defiance of “both canonicity and absolute authority” (17). Chapter 5 concerns British Library MS Royal 18.D.ii, an unfinished manuscript of Lydgate's Troy Book and Siege of Thebes commissioned by William Herbert and Anne Devereux as a gift for either Henry VI or Edward IV, a “megamanuscript” (156) that constitutes a resituating of the works in relation to the person of the monarch. A second lavish manuscript—Morgan Library and Museum MS M.126—produced for Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, is the subject of the final chapter. Containing Gower's Confessio Amantis, the manuscript is “tailored to the purposes of advocacy” in a period of political instability (189).

This lively and engaging study is beautifully produced and illustrated. Drimmer's style is accessible and thoughtful: she introduces each chapter with a kind of thinking device, perhaps mimicking textually the illuminated initials or portraits in which she is so heavily invested. The volume opens with one such thinking device: the miniature of John Lydgate writing in Huntington MS HM 268, and the deft close reading of that tiny portrait is a lesson in the importance of allusion for pictorial innovation in the fifteenth century. The plowed field visible in the background acts as a visual juxtaposition to the act of writing, calling our attention to the “act of reuse” (1). Drimmer is to be highly commended for this fresh appraisal of the work of the fifteenth-century illuminators.