Signs on the Edge Space, Text and Margin in Medieval Manuscripts

"Determining a difference between the spatially-'outermost' and the spatially-'innermost', and evaluating uses to which these spaces may be put within the visual arts are learned processes. They resemble the cognitive mapping that children use when developing skills for understanding alphabets and scripts that need to be read top to bottom, right to left or left to right. Each case requires learning strategies in order to navigate the geography of the writing or drawing space of a planar surface." "Enduring skills of this kind came from the Mediterranean basin through the spread of Roman civilization and subsequent Christian education to Ireland and Britain, and to the continental cultures of the Germanic peoples after the fourth century. This volume considers the ways that these heirs of Mediterranean aesthetics invested their native cconcepts of space, design and relative value with new meanings as they applied them within their own unique programmes of visual art and book production."--BOOK JACKET.