Stone Fidelity: marriage and emotion in medieval tomb sculpture. By Jessica Barker. 240mm. Pp xv + 336, 33 col ills, 63 b&w, maps, plans. The Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 2020. isbn 9781783272716. £50 (hbk).

Abstract

flection 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 . 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 s, 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 s (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  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 M (of c ), 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 ). 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.