Iconography and the Professional Reader The Politics of Book Production in the Douce Piers Plowman

Oxford Bodleian Library Douce 104 is the only extant manuscript of William Langland's fourteenth-century work Piers Plowman that is both illustrated and annotated, providing material evidence of interpretation by professional readers -- the artists, scribes, and annotators who constructed the work's meaning in an early fifteenth-century Anglo-Irish colonial context. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Denise L. Despres examine this evidence for what it can tell us about the politics of late-medieval manuscript preparation and the scholarly direction of manuscript use. Kerby-Fulton and Despres reconstruct, in vital detail, the lineaments of the community of professional readers and the pressures that produced it. And they show us the roles played by the manuscript's production team -- scribe, illustrator, annotator, rubricator, and even an elusive commissioning patron -- as all involved in the act of reading and interpreting. Overall, they offer a picture that both brings to life the ideologies and rivalries that affected bookshop practices and demonstrates the meditative, mnemonic, performative, and subversive nature of late-medieval reading.