Text and Picture in Anglo-Saxon England

Studies the interrelationship of text and picture in the only surviving illustrated Anglo-Saxon poetic manuscript.

A study of the relationship between text and picture in the only surviving illustrated Anglo-Saxon poetic manuscript. It locates the manuscript within the cultural contexts in which it was produced, documenting its transformation by poets, artists, scholars and editors from biblical poetry to a national historical narrative.This book explores the complex interrelationship between texts and drawings in the late tenth or early eleventh-century Junius II manuscript, the only surviving illustrated Anglo-Saxon poetic manuscript. The book, which contains a plate section of sixty-one illustrations, focuses on the way in which the drawings both illustrate the text and translate it into a new visual language. Poems and illustrations work to create a carefully crafted and unified manuscript, but both also use formulaic language, iconography and compositions to construct a web of intertextual and intervisual references that open the poems to readings far more diverse than those of the biblical books on which they are based. Together poems and drawings create a new and unique version of biblical history, and suggest ways in which biblical history relates to Anglo-Saxon history and the manuscript's Anglo-Saxon audience - a process which has been extended by the manuscript's many editors to include contemporary history and the contemporary reader.