Ebook: Text and image in "Le Mortifiement de Vaine Plaisance" and "Le Livre du Cuer d’Amours Espris" by Rene d’Anjou: Toward a semiotics of medieval manuscript illumination

Rene d'Anjou's Livre du Cuer is a romance allegory, set up as a dream narrative, recounting the failed quest of the knight Cuer (the personified heart of the narrator), who seeks to conquer the lady Doulce Mercy, held prisoner by the enemies of Love. The Mortifiement de Vaine Plaisance is a didactic religious allegory concerning the Soul, who desires heaven, distressed by her heart's yearning for worldly things ("vaine plaisance"), and the heart's subsequent purification by crucifixion.

The surviving illuminated manuscripts of these two fifteenth-century texts provide an interesting case study of the relationship between text and image, serving as impetus to a larger investigation of a more general and theoretical understanding of such a relationship. The first order is a thorough comparison of the miniature cycles and their visual interpretation of the details of the text. Subsequent chapters develop a semiotic approach to manuscript illumination as two sign systems interrelated in a single space, and discuss the particular case of allegory, represented both verbally (in the text) and visually (in the miniatures). The allegorical heart is the sign that connects the two texts, but the miniatures serve different purposes in each: in the Mortifiement, the miniatures amplify the text's lessons and its attempt to excite intense religious emotion; in the Livre du Cuer, they largely exalt the chivalric quest, which is fundamentally questioned by the text.