Freeze-framed: theorizing the historiated initials of the Régime du corps

This article offers a critical apparatus for analyzing a specific pictorial form, the historiated initial, found in several illustrated copies of the late medieval health guide known as the Régime du corps. In many of these initials, a single moment has been selected to represent a corresponding tex...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Word & image (London. 1985) 2016-04, Vol.32 (2), p.235-250
Main Author: Borland, Jennifer
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
freeze-frame
historiated initials
medical manuscripts
medieval art
narrative
Régime du corps
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Summary:This article offers a critical apparatus for analyzing a specific pictorial form, the historiated initial, found in several illustrated copies of the late medieval health guide known as the Régime du corps. In many of these initials, a single moment has been selected to represent a corresponding textual chapter; often the scene depicted is a particularly unresolved moment in the process of treatment. I propose that these initials functioned as open-ended episodes, freeze-framed moments in which the results of the treatment depicted are intentionally made unclear. This specific form of the historiated initial, which is monoscenic rather than one in a series of images, may initially seem static, but it actually creates an unexpected context for narrative potentiality through in-progress scenes that remain open to the viewer's resolution. The users of these household health guides were uniquely positioned to follow the guidance of the manuscript's didactic text while imagining the various possibilities or endings suggested in the unresolved scenes of the initials.
ISSN:0266-6286
1943-2178
DOI:10.1080/02666286.2016.1172546