Spenser and Some Pictorial Conventions: With Particular Reference to Illuminated Manuscripts (1940)

Chapter

Requires Authentication

Spenser and Some Pictorial Conventions: With Particular Reference to Illuminated Manuscripts (1940)

or

Purchase Chapter PDF

$42.00

Published by

View more publications by Princeton University Press

To Publisher Page

This chapter is in the book Essays by Rosemond Tuve

£)fen$ev αη& ^ome WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPTS * HIS article will treat of certain figures which receive markedly pictorial descriptive treatment in Spenser, and of certain figures which he uses almost as descriptive "counters," flashing a picture of them before us for associative (or decorative) purposes, much as modern film technique uses "symbolic" insets. It will describe the form in which such figures appear in actual picture, in texts which it is either certain or highly likely that Spenser read. I think that pictures helped form his conceptions. I shall not point to particular illustrations which he saw and copied; rather I shall show the character of a pictorial tradition which was vivid, rich, and available to him. One tries to read a poet's sources with continuous attention to how they may have acted as spurs to his imagination, especially to his visual imagination and hence to his descriptive power. And one must recognize that the reading of a text in such different forms as a "modern" French print, an early English black-letter with woodcuts, or a fifteenth-century manuscript with illuminations, makes correspondingly different impressions; the variation in form almost constitutes a variation in the text itself. We perhaps tend to forget that these differing forms were all of them accessible and familiar to the Elizabethan reader. Illuminated manuscripts particularly may seem to us difficult to come at; to the Elizabethan they were ordinary and available. A rich pictorial tradition lay to Spenser's hand in these varying forms in which he could read his sources, and particularly in manuscripts, the least examined of them. And the points at which Spenser's descriptions relate themselves to this rich pictorial tradition are frequent and often most striking. The figures to be considered are conventional figures in book illustration. Not only is their very occurrence in manuscript illumination traditional, but also certain recurrent details of their representation are fixed by tradition, i.e., there are two constants, convention enters in two ways. In the first place, the mention of such * Reprinted from Studies in Philology 37 (1940), 149-76. yDicfoviaC. (Conventions

You are currently not able to access this content.

Not sure if you should have access? Please log in using an institutional account to see if you have access to view or download this content.

Purchase Chapter PDF

$42.00

£)fen$ev αη& ^ome WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPTS * HIS article will treat of certain figures which receive markedly pictorial descriptive treatment in Spenser, and of certain figures which he uses almost as descriptive "counters," flashing a picture of them before us for associative (or decorative) purposes, much as modern film technique uses "symbolic" insets. It will describe the form in which such figures appear in actual picture, in texts which it is either certain or highly likely that Spenser read. I think that pictures helped form his conceptions. I shall not point to particular illustrations which he saw and copied; rather I shall show the character of a pictorial tradition which was vivid, rich, and available to him. One tries to read a poet's sources with continuous attention to how they may have acted as spurs to his imagination, especially to his visual imagination and hence to his descriptive power. And one must recognize that the reading of a text in such different forms as a "modern" French print, an early English black-letter with woodcuts, or a fifteenth-century manuscript with illuminations, makes correspondingly different impressions; the variation in form almost constitutes a variation in the text itself. We perhaps tend to forget that these differing forms were all of them accessible and familiar to the Elizabethan reader. Illuminated manuscripts particularly may seem to us difficult to come at; to the Elizabethan they were ordinary and available. A rich pictorial tradition lay to Spenser's hand in these varying forms in which he could read his sources, and particularly in manuscripts, the least examined of them. And the points at which Spenser's descriptions relate themselves to this rich pictorial tradition are frequent and often most striking. The figures to be considered are conventional figures in book illustration. Not only is their very occurrence in manuscript illumination traditional, but also certain recurrent details of their representation are fixed by tradition, i.e., there are two constants, convention enters in two ways. In the first place, the mention of such * Reprinted from Studies in Philology 37 (1940), 149-76. yDicfoviaC. (Conventions

You are currently not able to access this content.

Not sure if you should have access? Please log in using an institutional account to see if you have access to view or download this content.

Purchase Chapter PDF

$42.00