12 - ‘Mise en page’ in the French Lancelot-Grail: The First 150 Years of the Illustrative Tradition

Summary

If the number of surviving manuscripts is a reliable guide to what was read in the Middle Ages, the five-part Lancelot-Grail Cycle (or Vulgate Cycle) and its derivatives and followers ranked with Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae and the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle of Charlemagne's exploits in Spain as one of the most popular vernacular texts. Surviving in over a hundred manuscripts, most of which are densely illustrated, it provides a formidable and somewhat unwieldy corpus from which to explore questions about the format and layout of text and illustration in the period between the composition of the texts c. 1220 and the decline of interest in vernacular manuscripts towards the end of the fifteenth century. This is the period that witnesses the origin and development of the illustration of vernacular texts in France, to which the Lancelot-Grail in its various forms, both non-cyclic and cyclic, is a significant contributor. I survey here what patterns of textual and pictorial layout the manuscripts of the first 150 years of the Lancelot-Grail present. I focus on the appearance of the illustrated page: how its text is laid out and what format is used for the illustrations.

The kinds of questions I ask are these: What kinds of variation occur in the layout of text and picture? Do changes in text layout and picture formats vary together? How important are regional preferences? Is there a chronological progression? How close can we come, in this period of sparse documentation, to determining who made the choices, and on what basis? The attributions I propose for dating and placing these manuscripts are based on a study of the style of their illustrations; it is on this basis, too, that I reconstruct ‘groups’ of related manuscripts (to use a more neutral term than ‘atelier’ or ‘workshop’). Almost all the Lancelot-Grail manuscripts can be shown to have been made by teams of craftsmen whose activities were not limited to the production of romances, but included liturgical and devotional works as well as those made for knowledge or for pleasure. Nor are these books necessarily of inferior artistic quality to their more expensive relatives, although there are instances where qualitative distinctions exist. In most cases I have argued the justification of the stylistic and chronological sequence in more detail elsewhere, and further collaborative work on these questions is in progress.