The Sociable Text of the “Troilus Frontispiece”: A Different Mode of Textuality

Abstract

Textuality can be considered as sets of social activities rather than as the individual consumption of a completed product. Drawing from concepts in medieval rhetoric, medieval textual practices particularly valued texts as productive of a social occasion, consisting not just of a passive audience and the performer of a completed work, but including as well the matters from which the author made his poem. I redefine the idea of “authorial intention” as a property of the artifact, which, on any given occasion, initiates a three-way interaction among the work acting through its varying styles, the materials from which the work is made and with which it continues in conversation, and the audience, conceived as active “judges” not as silent “recipients.” The “Troilus Frontispiece” painting, made around 1420 for Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde , is a visualization of this complex textuality, in which the upper zone figures represent the Matter of Troy (particularly through a visual pun on Aeneid 2.49), the author-figure represents not the historical Chaucer but the articulate poem inventing its own stories from the well-known Troy materials, and the audience shown as not only listening but actively commenting as the poem-figure speaks. Two pictures from Les douze dames de rhétorique (1465) are also discussed as visualizations of such “group textuality”: “Deduccion loable,” a figure of Invention planning how to proceed in her work; and “Glorieuse achevissance,” an ivory and gold statue who invites the audience into her picture to debate if she is “beautiful or ugly.”

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