Sir Gwaine in Art Sir Gwaine in Art Manuscript
British Library Cotton fiber Nero A.ten, f. 125r/129r; © The British Library
New scientific analysis may completely alter our understanding of i of the most famous manuscripts for students of Centre English literature. British Library Cotton Nero A.x is the sole extant manuscript of the works of the so-chosen Gawain-poet, the bearding writer of Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Dark-green Knight. These jewels of the Alliterative Revival are today some of the best-known medieval English language works, but we would not have them at all if they did not survive in this single late fourteenth-century manuscript. Fifty-fifty better for students of Middle English literature is that this manuscript is illustrated, including scenes from all 4 texts. For years, scholars have offered only a poor critical assessment of the pictures, an assessment that a few more recent scholars have begun to reexamine. Are these actually the crudely executed illustrations of an amateur artist?
British Library Cotton wool Nero A.x (art. 3), f. 82r/86r © The British Library
New discoveries, based on assay of the pigments and ink, may modify our understanding of the office these illustrations may have played in the original production of the manuscript. Maidie Hilmo, of the Academy of Victoria, has studied these illustrations extensively, most recently in a new overview of the pictures that she has written for eventual publication on the Cotton Nero A.ten. Project, an international initiative of the Academy of Calgary to brand digital images, transcriptions, and critical editions of the manuscript more than widely available. She requested a scientific assay of the pigments, and one of the near striking results is that the aforementioned iron gall ink was used for both the text and the underdrawings of the images, every bit Paul Garside, the Senior Conservation Scientist at the British Library, has indicated. Is information technology possible this may hateful the illustrations, or at least the underdrawings, were fatigued effectually the same time the manuscript was originally written, possibly even by the scribe? In that location is no smoking gun, but it is true that iron gall ink was not what illuminators ordinarily used for their drawings – this ink was far more typically the medium of scribes, rather than manuscript artists, as indicated by Mark Clarke, an internationally acknowledged good on medieval pigments.
British Library Purple MS nineteen D.ii, f. 395r
Traditionally, there has been a bang-up bargain of debate surrounding the relative timeframe of the copying of the manuscript's text and the drawing and painting (not necessarily the aforementioned affair!) of the illustrations. Many earlier efforts at dating the illustrations suggested that they were made around 1400-1420, potentially some decades afterwards the 1375-1400 copying of the text.i This new assay suggests such dating of the pictures may be off, and invites future scholars to reassess the dating of the various components of the illustrations in relation to the text. Hilmo considers Jennifer Lee'southward statement that the heavy-handed painting may have been washed by some other hand, unlike from the artist of the underdrawings.ii
British Library Cotton fiber Nero A.x (art. iii), f. 126r/130r © The British Library
Hilmo invites the meditative reader to reconsider the role of the miniatures not but in illustrating individual poems but likewise in linking all four poems into a cohesive narrative reshaping and unifying them "into a larger interpretive, typological and iconographic framework." Whether or not a thoughtful scribe was involved in this visual reconceptualization of the poems equally a whole, this study encourages us to come across fresh meanings in our successive encounters with Cotton fiber Nero A.10.
For the full explanation of this new research, explore Hilmo's overview and a draft of the consummate commodity now available on the Chequered Board (she encourages responses).
Nicole Eddy
Medieval Establish
University of Notre Dame
ane. Meet A. I. Doyle, "The Manuscripts," in Center English Alliterative Poesy and Its Literary Background: Seven Essays, ed. David Lawton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982), 88–100; Sarah Horrall, "Notes on British Library, MS Cotton fiber Nero A X," Manuscripta 30 (1986): 191–98.
ii. Jennifer A. Lee, "The Illuminating Critic: The Illustrator of Cotton Nero A.X," Studies in Iconography iii (1977): 17–45.
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