Over the last few centuries, we have become so used to reading acres of unbroken text that perhaps it is easy to overlook the semiotic importance of the visual introduction or commentary pictures can provide. A child reading a story with pictures may well imagine characters according to those pictures: the reading experience is quite altered. Stuart Sillars’ work on illustrated editions of Shakespeare, from Rowe’s (1709) onwards, has shown how sophisticatedly designers used iconographic allusion, the rhetoric of body and posture and background detail to influence how a solitary reader, who possibly had never been to a theatre, might read what is originally a script of the communal experience of a play. Similarly, the interpretative, authorising and summarising nature of the elaborate engraved title pages increasingly common in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is easily demonstrated. Sonja Drimmer’s important book now alters how we can approach illuminations in the mss of Chaucer, Lydgate and Gower.

Her time span is from the foundation (1403) of what became the Stationers’ Company to Caxton establishing his press in Westminster (1476). 1403 almost exactly coincides with when the first elaborate mss of Chaucer appear, just after his death. This is just when something like a canon of English secular writing is beginning to be established and when the idea of the author, especially of an English author writing in English, is being radically revised.

Illumination or illustrations in medieval mss are rarely merely decorative. They operate in ways mnemonic, summary, interpretative and structural. Historiated initials often say more important things than simply marking new beginnings or sections. Michael Camille’s book on the Luttrell Psalter (Reference Camille1998), besides exploring the ideological, social and indeed spiritual implications of commissioning this ms, demonstrated clearly how functional was its decoration. This, of course, raises questions about the relation of illuminator to text illustrated, and how much initiative he felt was allowed to him. Obviously, with new mss of Patristic, Scriptural or Classical texts the illuminator’s function is subsidiary to presenting the authoritative text, where there is already an established discourse or tradition. But mss of secular poetry in English, until the later 1400s a literary language with nowhere near the cachet of august Latin or elegant French, are a different matter. The question ‘What is a modern author?’ was beginning to be discussed in humanist Italy around 1400, but there is a more acute question very relevant to Drimmer’s argument: ‘What status, or authority, can a modern poet, writing in English, claim?’

Drimmer’s introduction proposes that illustrations in vernacular secular mss in English from the early fifteenth century are more important and subtle than has been acknowledged, with significant relevance to developing ideas of the author. A dignity, slowly growing, was being afforded to secular works in English, so that in appearance they recalled mss in Latin and French, the high-status languages. Furthermore, she argues that the illustrations, often semiotically complex, deserve ‘reading’ as a sort of commentary, and that illuminators, facing the problem of sourcing/developing illustrations for this new class of non-devotional, non-legal, non-Classical works, re-deployed pictorial conventions from several different genres. Just as for writers inventio might involve an allusive intertextuality, so illuminators devised new images through referential techniques – assembling, adapting, combining image types. So, reading the words is necessarily qualified not just by strategic decisions – paper or parchment, size, mise en page, number and placing of illuminations – made initially by the ms’s commissioner, but also by what an illuminator might include. Thus illuminators play a major part in a book’s reception – if not as co-authors, which would grossly overstate the case, at least as presenters. Indeed, given the oculocentricity of medieval culture, there need be no surprise at how subtly visuals in any context were read.

Three sections make up the main part of the book. Chapter 1 discusses the London book trade and the illuminators and scribes who worked in it. (Drimmer examines, with some scepticism, claims that have been advanced for Adam Pinkhurst.) She stresses the versatility of people working in this growing trade, who could move between the various scripts (as required by document type) to illumination to binding and so on – rather as Renaissance artists and their workshops could handle a bit of engineering, sculpture, painting or bronze casting as needed.

Part 2 surveys, with a chapter on each, how the three soon to be ‘canonical’ English authors, Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate, were treated. The Ellesmere ms (written just after Chaucer’s death) curiously presents him not as auctor at all at the beginning, where we moderns might expect, but as one of his own pilgrims, whose index finger points to ‘Heere bigynneth chaucers tale of melibee’ – a picture that certainly questions his ontological status even if that were not already in question in the text – where a diffident persona, clearly not the actual Chaucer (a tough operator) whom his first audience knew, says he will tell how he remembers his people seemed to him – and then tells us things nobody could ever know (eg the Merchant in the General Prologue, ‘No man knew that he was in dette’). However, slightly later, in British Library ms Lansdowne 851, ‘Chaucer’ proffers a copy of his work in the initial ‘W’ of ‘Whan that aprille …’, line one of the General Prologue: this does suggest an authorial relation to the book, but it is unclear to whom it is being offered, if anyone – the absence of recipient removes the expected humility book-offering usually suggests.

This is quite unlike the illumination tradition that seems a feature of mss of Lydgate’s Troy Book from the 1420s onwards, which shows Lydgate humbly offering it to Henry v. That, while properly humble, claims a paradoxical authority, and readers in high places. This marks a big change in status, desired or actual. When in Rylands Library ms English 1, fol 11, the Troy Book is offered to a Henry some thirty-odd years dead, it is clear the association has become an authorising convention. (Almost like advertising motifs a century ago, ‘As Supplied To [insert high-status recipient]’.) Drimmer’s key point is that in the early 1400s there were no established conventions for (re)presenting authors of secular works in English. Furthermore, in two mss of Occleve’s Regiment of Princes, a figure in the margin resembling Ellesmere’s Chaucer points to the line ‘do make us ende in soothfastenesse’; but this reflects more on Occleve’s self-presentation than it does on Chaucer’s status: Occleve explicitly revered him. When, in 1598, John Speed engraved The Progenie of Geffrey Chaucer as the frontispiece facing the title page of Speght’s The Workes of our Antient and Lerned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer, this by now recognisable figure – portrait conventions are by now established – has that emphatic hand reversed, pointing to himself: ‘I am The Author. This is My Book.’ That is very far from the diffident anonymity of Chaucer’s own persona in so many poems and from the tongue-in-cheek deflection of his own likeness in the description he gives to his Host. Gone are conventions of humble deference or presentation to a superiority that qualify much medieval vernacular writing and representation of authors. Writing has, so to speak, become gentrified and the author authoritative. However, had this plausible trajectory been in some measure anticipated? For I could wish Drimmer had felt able to include discussion of the flamboyant frontispiece to Troilus and Crisyede in the early fifteenth-century Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, ms 61. Some claimed this lovely, enigmatic, picture shows Chaucer reading to a courtly audience, and attempts have been made to identify others in the picture. Whatever the truth of that – the picture is certainly not journalism – Chaucer is shown speaking (or performing, if you prefer) in the authority position of a pulpit. That interesting sidelight on the discussion does not sit wholly happily with the case made for the indeterminacy of authorial status in the early 1400s, but this expensive picture certainly does indicate the illuminator’s importance. This ms was a very high-status object: someone important valued Chaucer’s work very highly. Yet the ms is unfinished: spaces were left for illuminations that were never executed – eighty in all, and eight initials, were planned – and these spaces often correspond to marginal notes in other mss.

Drimmer then explores with equal resourcefulness how Gower and Lydgate were handled. They, with Chaucer, constitute the authors ‘everyone must know’ by the late 1400s (if Skelton, who knew everybody, and was Henry viii’s tutor while that prince was still a promising lad, is anything to go by).

Part 3 of her book, stressing her argument that illuminators were integral to English verse’s rising prestige, examines how Lydgate’s works were presented as both contemporary commentary and as future history. Moreover, she has a persuasive discussion of how the narrative illuminations in Gower’s Confessio Amantis in New York, Pierpont Morgan ms M116 (of c 1470), re-present that wonderful poem (a subtle multi-voiced Mirror for Princes as well as a profound meditation on change and time) as highly specific to Edward iv during the Wars of the Roses – indeed, as diagnostic and prophetic. Here, the long-dead author’s work is doing things of which he could never have thought – though he might have approved.

She closes with discussion of an issue that has lurked on the sidelines of her whole argument: if illustrators/illustrations were central to English verse’s rising prestige, why were there no illustrations to the tales in Canterbury Tales? She suggests, in effect, that the tradition begun by Ellesmere of prefacing each tale with an image of the pilgrim set up a reflexive dynamic between tale and ostensible teller that might be prejudiced by foregrounding events in the narrative. Whether Chaucer ever wanted this quasi-psychological relationship of tale to teller seriously to qualify a reading is doubtful, though for many students nowadays it is a default position despite its palpable nonsense when the Shipman’s Tale’s narrator is female, the Nun’s Priest exists only as a picture and the Knight cannot be a first-person narrator without being a time traveller. The way so many modern readers so commonly give the pilgrims, created in Chaucer’s imagination, quasi-authorial status is ironic tribute to the power of those Ellesmere illuminations.

‘It was not just poets and scribes who made literature: it was illuminators too’ (p 230). Does the closing claim of this good book stand? Given the effective redefinition given to that problematic word ‘literature’, I think so. It offers a way of exploring and appreciating books, poems, we thought we knew in a newly-nuanced historical context. But for few readers without access to the actual mss, or facsimiles, will this be actually possible? Meanwhile the lavish illustration – twenty-seven full colour – of this book will have to do.

The book is decently produced – though the typeface chosen for its large pages is mean, and a trial to aging eyes. I checked the index a few times and found some errors: better proofreading might have helped.