The Forgotten Chaucer Scholarship of Mary Eliza Haweis, 1848–1898

This chapter considers how illuminators responded to the challenges presented by the emerging concept of a contemporary author of English poetry at a time when no such profession existed, focusing on all extant representations of Chaucer in manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales. These challenges also formed a central preoccupation of the texts that illuminators illustrated; yet limners’ responses to these challenges do not replicate in picture the anxieties that are voiced in the texts they illustrate. Rather, manuscript producers, informed by the dynamics of their profession, parallel in a uniquely visual mode the anxieties then in literary circulation. To those who authored images, who is the author of a text? And how is an authorial identity negotiated via pictorial allusions that substituted for the rejected convention of the writing auctor in manuscripts of Middle Enghlish verse? In responding to these questions, I show that the limners of the earliest major works in Middle English verse produced authors through a concatenation of voices and pictures, a repertoire deriving from pictorial media extending far beyond the parameters of their own texts. When tasked with pinning a face to a text, illuminators had no choice but to consult their own notions about a text’s ontology and the author’s ontological status with respect to it. This quandary was particularly pressing when it came to illuminating the metafictional and, following A. C. Spearing’s coinage, the autographic works that populated England’s literary scene in the later Middle Ages. The arguments that illuminators frequently offered arose not only from the texts in front of them but also from the cache of images that made up the intellectual storehouse of their profession. From these images, I argue that the tradition of authorial portraiture for Middle English poets is an indeterminate one that discloses, more than anything else, the hesitations and reluctance of its makers. The consequence of this argument, to be explored in later chapters, is that whatever authority is allowed the rhetorical “I” of the text is a contingent authority, drawn not from the virtuosity of language, truth of content, or prestige of its author but rather from copy-specific features of the manuscript itself. Without a sense of the “true” origins of a text, literature was, in this period, a flexible cultural production open to opportunistic manipulation and instrumentalization that illustrative programs could—and did—provide.

Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 2019

Renaissance Quarterly, 2007

Chapter One from my monograph, The Art of Allusion: Illuminators and the Making of English Literature, 1403-1476 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). This chapter offers an account of the professional conditions of manuscript illumination in late medieval London, based on new archival research and previously unpublished documents as well as a survey of existing research on the subject. Recent scholarship, which I address in this chapter, has elevated the scribe to a central position in the dissemination of English literature and has spotlighted the ways in which these professionals edited and organized poetry for consumption by a range of audiences. Here, I unite archival research into London’s book trade with recent developments in the study of scribes to provide a picture of the activities of manuscript illuminators. Their professional practices created a set of conditions that had an impact on how illuminators went about their labor and in turn had consequences for the images they produced. These conditions include illuminators’ anonymity and indifference to individuation, their professional versatility, and the collaborative and decentralized nature of their work. In characterizing illuminators’ practices and habits, I provide a foundation in the realities of the book trade for the larger claims made throughout the book.

Medieval Images, Icons, and Illustrated English Literary Texts (chapter 6), 2004

In its restrained elegance, the visual presentation of the Canterbury Tales in the Ellesmere manuscriptl is quite unlike that of the comparatively humble miniatures of the Pearl manuscript, but there is an absence of images of divinity and saints in both. Instead of portraying potentially idolatrous images in illustration of the tales, the Ellesmere manuscript portrays the pilgrim narrators. Such a strategy indirectly emphasizes authors, if not divine authorship, although that is alluded to in Chaucer' s leue or "confession" on the last folio (fig. 58). That focus on authorship, however, does not account entirely for the reticence about making divine images in a manuscript intended, as I will suggest, for the new Lancastrian regime, which was to become identified with the orthodox position advocating the use of religious images. Timing may have been a factor if this manuscript was made during a 1 San Marino, Huntington Library, MS Ellesmere 26 C9, made in London probably within the frrst decade ofthe fifteenth century (see discussions in The Ellesmere Chaucer, cited below). I would like to thank Mary Robertson, the Chief Curator of Manuscripts, for granting me access to the precious original, which made possible many insights, both technical and conceptual. This manuscript has been published in a facsimile, "a covetable object in its own right" (in the words of Jill Mann in the information brochure), by the Huntington Library and Yushodo Co. ofTokyo as The Ellesmere Chaucerin 1995. A companion volume, Martin Stevensand Daniel Woodward, eds., The Ellesmere Chaucer: Essays in Interpretation (San Marino and Tokyo, 1995), contains the most extensive studies of individual aspects of this manuscript to date. It includes bibliographical references, as does Kathleen Scott' s catalogue entry no. 42 for the Ellesmere in Later Gothic Manuscripts 2: 140-43. In my transcriptions from the Ellesmere manuscript, all Middle English expansions of abbreviations have been inserted italicized and follow the line numbers in Larry Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990). Expansions ofLatin abbreviations have been enclosed in brackets. References are given parenthetically, employing standard abbreviations for the tales. Prologues are designated by "Pro," so that "ProFrT," e.g., indicates the Prologue to the Friar 's Tale. Citations ofChaucer' s other literary works arealso from The Riverside Chaucer.

2012

ATLANTIS, 2009