Medieval manuscripts are full of hidden narratives, which we might liken to the signs left the morning after a snow. Signs of the dog at the fire hydrant or the squirrel and its seeds are various intersections where we can infer from tracks what happened, though the agent is gone. In codicological study, the designer—one of the least talked-of participants in the manuscript’s creation—is the absent agent, and his story or narrative is left only occasionally in his notes to the book’s illuminator. One such absent agent is the author of an extensive set of illuminator’s instructions found in a copy of Thomas of Cantimpré's encyclopedia, De naturis rerum (DNR), now Valenciennes Bibliothèque Municipale MS 320, written and painted about 1290. The quality and sheer quantity of its 670 pictures point to an institutional or private patron of considerable wealth and influence, perhaps the prior of an Augustinian convent near Paris. These instructions show that Valenciennes MS 320 was constructed according to some of the new techniques developed for the rapidly expanding late-thirteenth-century trade in books with extensive programs of illustration. - [Author]

Language: English

1525-6790