Visual Language in the Old English Cadmonian Genesis

Abstract

Although considerable scholarly attention has been focused on the narrative as a literary form in medieval literature, literary scholars have generally ignored the extensive cycles of illuminations, or pictorial narratives, which accompany some of these texts. This paper considers the ways in which the artist of one biblical narrative, the Old English Caefmonian Genesis (Bodleian Library, MS Junius II), successfully created a consecutive series of visual episodes which correspond to the narrative sequence of the poetic text. The artist and the poet formulated a progressive chain of incidents, organized to tell a story. The illustration, furthermore, reveal the artist’s awareness of the poem’s content, theme, and style. The drawings not only approximate visually the iconography of the poem and highlight the poem’s theme, but they stimulate in a visual language the rhetorical structure and stylistic features of the poem itself. Emphasis will be placed on the artist’s creation of visual type-scenes and a symbolic color code. The paper begins with a consideration of three types of literary criticism through art.