Ebook: Fair and Varied Forms: Visual Textuality in Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts

Transferred to Digital Printing 2009.

The ideas that have come to fruition in this book began long before I began work on my Ph.D. dissertation at Purdue University. The almost fifteen years when I made my living as a graphic artist established ways of thinking about texts as visual elements that interact with pictures to generate meanings beyond the literal sense of the words. I believe that it is perhaps only in advertising art today that we find the same level of awareness of the appearance of text and the importance of letter forms that was the everyday attitude of scribes and illustrators in the Middle Ages. This awareness has helped me to look at illustrated manuscripts from the point of view of the scribe and illustrator, to better understand the use of schemata and iconography, and to understand spatial arrangement of elements in the graphic field as part of the meaning generated by the page.