Narrative or episodic sequences appear in the marginal spaces of several manuscripts illuminated in England and France in the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In a group of English prayerbooks they occur on nearly every folio,... more
Narrative or episodic sequences appear in the marginal spaces of several manuscripts illuminated in England and France in the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In a group of English prayerbooks they occur on nearly every folio, drawing the viewer from one page to the next through the potency of their storytelling. These scenes do not illustrate the Latin prayers, although in many cases careful study unveils connections to nearby words. Rather, their narrative connections provide a visual focus that, for the lay patrons for whom most of these books were made, may have been of more immediate interest than the prayers themselves. This essay begins to explore these sequences by examining the ways in which they draw a viewer from page to page, beyond the heavily-decorated incipit pages that signal the start of each text section, into the textual wildernesses of subsequent pages.
