Illuminating the borders of northern French and Flemish manuscripts, ca. 1270-1310

Description

During the last decades of the thirteenth century, illuminators in Northern France and Flanders were working with an established repertory of images to decorate the margins of manuscripts. This development is best known in the luxury devotional manuals, but a number of the images idiosyncratic to the repertory are also found in the margins of Bibles, romances, and reference works illuminated by the same workshops. This dissertation examines the dissemination of motifs, both among the different texts and within the structure of the individual manuscripts. Based on the codicology, iconography, and historical context of a selected group of manuscripts, this study investigates the working methods of the illuminators and explores the regional developments in book production. Particular attention is given to one of the workshops contributing to the repertory, the Dampierre Group, named for the psalter made for Guy of Dampierre, the Count of Flanders (1280-1305). Analysis of this psalter's physical structure reveals that marginal motifs occur in clusters, so the method proves useful in analyzing other luxury manuscripts. Although marginalia in manuscripts such as the Vulgate Arthur, the Speculum majus by Vincent of Beauvais, and the Trésor by Brunetto Latini, are spread farther apart over the folios, iconographic relationships among these sometimes fanciful additions, the principal miniatures, and the text can be suggested in individual cases. Because illuminators in this region, unlike their contemporaries in Paris and England, applied marginalia to all types of texts, this study enables a broader understanding of the environment in which these manuscripts were produced and read.