The link between the image and the word was exploited in illuminated manuscripts, a rich and varied sematic cross-pollination, a case of one plus one equalling five. At first glance, this art of book illumination with its hand-painted twirlings and swirlings, the gesso-raised sections giving a 3D element, the vermillion, ground lapis lazuli, and fine gold leaf, the mix of living and fanciful creatures, seems to be from the long, long ago. It also seems odd that with modern printing presses, commercial books aren’t produced with such flounces, at best the black printer’s ink runs to an engorged letter at the beginning of a chapter, and only a handful of books are illuminated by hand in modern times, true curios.
Robyn Cadwallader’s latest novel, Book of Colours, tells of many aspects of the production, sale and use of illuminated books. Set in England in the 1320s, the trade is plied by a group of secular men, masters and indentured apprentices, governed by a fraternity, involved in the production of new texts, with supporting illustrations. This differs significantly from the depiction in The Name of the Rose where the trade was that of religious orders, slavishly reproducing fixed knowledge before the vagaries of time and moulds and rodents and fire destroyed them.
But Cadwallader’s novel is peppered by the incursion of a woman, trained by her father and secretly working at the level of a master in this male-only arena. But the character, Gemma, intuits; the images must point the reader in the direction of the text, distilling a key aspect of the story. Like the modern sound bite, indeed the internet’s gift of the GIF, I wonder has anything really changed? A picture still paints a thousand words. So, sketch out your designs, mix your colours, lift and dip your brushes, paint on the gesso and let’s explore the dimensions of Book of Colours.
What was the first whiff you had of this project as a novel?
It was quite a few years ago when I was working on my PhD and researching medieval texts. I was drawn to the beauty and delicacy of medieval manuscripts, but particularly intrigued by the huge variety of decoration. Here were books of prayer commissioned for women and decorated not only with illuminations of Christ, the Virgin and the saints, fine flourishes and curling vines, but with a carnival of creatures that didn’t seem at all suitable for a woman’s devotions. In some books, the margins are alive with the whole world, both human and fantastical, where animals behave as humans, monks make love to nuns, dragons fly, and hybrid monsters roam. To twenty-first century eyes, there seemed a disjuncture between the ordered, holy words and illuminations in the centre of the page, and the riotous and playful borders. Just what was going on? Some say the pictures in the borders were aids to memory, just like page markers — but why so many and why so ribald? Some say they were exempla, stories that reminded the woman at prayer of the ugliness and wages of sin. But it seemed to me that the borders resisted, pushed back against the authority of the centre. Was this the medieval world painted in its wholeness on these pages? Those questions were the beginning.
What background do you bring to the text? – I’m thinking the knowledge of the major areas of art/drawing/illumination and the temper of the times. How did these draw you to the text?
I’ve read and studied English medieval literature since my undergraduate days, and went on to complete a PhD in medieval literature, and it’s impossible to really understand the import of the stories without a strong knowledge of the religious and social context. Research for my thesis on female virginity and agency delved into the church teaching and church power, and research for my first novel, The Anchoress, looked into theological and social attitudes to women. For Book of Colours, I also investigated the complex running of a city with its mix of high and low, all crammed in together; political machinations taking place in Westminster and in castles and towns all around the country, but all potentially impacting the daily lives of Londoners.
I’ve always had an interest in art and design, and especially in contemporary interactions of word and image, so familiar to us all in the digital age that it’s sometimes difficult to see with new eyes. Studying the interaction of word and decoration, all meticulously drawn by hand in the Middle Ages, has given me a new appreciation of how rich and complex that relationship can be. I’ve dabbled in pigments and parchment, watched gold leaf applied and seen it float on the air, drawn and doodled the strange marginal creatures form these books of prayer. I’ve read what remains of the detailed teachings and techniques of the early masters. Beyond that, I’ve read about how parchment is cured and stretched; about brushes and quills; about more modern studies of the remarkable advances technology is making that give us more and more information about the slow and meticulous building of a medieval illuminated manuscript.
Your first novel, The Anchoress, was told shifting between two distinct and delineated points of view, Sarah and Ranaulf. Book of Colours is told through an array of points of views. What prompted this decision? How do the many points of view relate to and inform the story? What were some of the challenges of “head hopping”? And what informed the decision not to go into some of the major character’s points of view. Did this create dramatic irony for the reader?
My three main characters are Gemma, the wife of the master limner (illuminator), Will, a qualified limner who has recently fled from Cambridge to London, and Mathilda, patron of the book and the wife of a rising gentry man. Each one of these characters is portrayed in close third person, thus moving inside their thoughts and feelings, and each one is vital to the kinds of issues I wanted to explore in the story. Women’s concerns are so rarely considered in medieval texts, so I was especially concerned to give Gemma and Mathilda their voices. They are from quite distinct classes and I was interested in the ways in which their experiences, as women in a patriarchal world, were alike and also very different. In terms of the creation of the decorated book, I wanted to explore the idea that, no matter how authoritative a text (both word and image) might be, especially a religious one, the writer and artist cannot control the way a reader will understand their work. Thus, even though Will and Gemma are instructed to paint according to convention, as they work on it, each image has the potential to stir memories and concerns, and these will be reflected in the details of the pictures they create. Similarly, Mathilda, the patron who receives the decorated book, will understand and interpret each picture both according to what she has been taught, but more importantly, thorough her own needs and concerns at the time. 
I didn’t deliberately set out to tell the story this way because I don’t plan my novels, and prefer to let them evolve as I write. The characters were very real to me, so I didn’t have trouble moving from head to head, but I did find that having three main characters was structurally a challenge … well, sometimes a headache! (more below)
I avoided moving inside the head of a fourth main character, John, the master limner and owner of the atelier, even though he has his own distinct problems. I felt that ultimately it would be more powerful to portray the impact of his situation through the responses of those around him. This creates and heightens the dramatic tension between the characters.
In addition to the many points of view, Book of Colours contains many different types of texts – the main narratives, some told in the present tense some past, sections of the book written within the book, The Art of Illumination, and written sections of the book under illumination. The two main narrative threads are initially set two years apart, one narrative travelling faster than the other until they converge. What were the challenges of balancing the conversations between all these disparate elements?
The short answer is ‘many challenges’, and there were times when I wondered if the two narrative threads, each moving at a different pace, was too ambitious. However, I stayed with the structure because I wanted to show the book being read alongside the same book being created. So, Gemma paints the Annunciation (announcement) of the birth of Christ and more than a year later Mathilda views that picture, but in my novel, we shift immediately from Gemma painting to Mathilda pondering the same picture. It’s a little like a reverse flashback, and a technique we are more familiar with from cinema: think of how quickly and easily a movie shifts between time frames. The effect of the two narrative threads is that, beyond simply showing that the limner’s intention for the painting may be lost once the book leaves her hands (as discussed above), it gives the book of hours and its many stories a shifting, breathing life. No story or image ever remains static.
One of the main challenges of this structure was to construct each thread so that, despite the differences in time, place and circumstance, there were points of commonality. I wanted to show the ways in which the book of hours bridged the gulf between the two women, even though they would never meet. That meant I had to be sure to keep the story in each thread authentic, and not artificially contort it to meet the needs of the structure. Basically, it meant lots of rewriting.
One of the other threads in the novel is that the beginning of most chapters has a brief quotation from a guide to illumination called The Art of Illumination. Each quotation is entirely about illumination, its philosophy or techniques or pigments and so on, but also relates in some way to the main subject of the chapter it heads. These were great fun to research and write, and perhaps the easiest aspect of the whole novel.
The novel explores the roles of women forbidden from working in artisan trades by the various governing guilds. What evidence is there that women did work in this unacknowledged manner? Were their many women working like this? And in other guilds?
The novel is set at a time when guilds — the governing body of a trade — were gradually being formed in London. A trade could only form a guild when the city leaders recognised that it was established and well run. The Stationers Guild (comprising scribes, illuminators, binders, etc) was formed in 1401, about 80 years after the period of Book of Colours. There is little information about the specific structures governing the book trade up until that time, but we can assume that, as with other trades pre-guild formation, it would have been structured around fraternities, local organisations usually associated with a church and set up to support members and provide some governance.
No women are listed as limners in the early decades of the century in London, though this may be more a result of the general attitude to women and their status than an indication of their involvement. Women played a significant and vital role in the labour force of London, and worked in a wide range of trades from ale-making to cobbling to all aspects of construction work. Often they worked alongside their husband in his business. Nonetheless, however great or necessary their skill, they were considered to be second-tier workers. A wife or daughter might be accepted as an apprentice, but she could not gain full membership of a guild, and would often be restricted to roles that prevented her from marketing the product she made, thus being confined to work in the home or shop; it was often women who trained apprentices. Even in crafts where ‘women’s skills’ predominated, such as silkworking, no officially organised guild existed in the medieval period. Many other women worked in occupations considered to be unskilled, such as domestic service and midwifery, for which no guild was created.
How much work went into recreating such a clear picture of 1320s’ London? How did you overcome being half-a-world away from the source material? Was that an interdiction or an addition?
I have visited London several times, and in 2013, when I was just beginning my research, I went armed with a map of thirteenth-century London and walked the streets and lanes in the neighbourhood of Paternoster Row. It has all changed enormously, of course, but there is real value in simply walking the territory and imagining. Landmarks like the London Wall, the Thames, Guildhall and St Paul’s Cathedral remain in place, even if changed. All this helped me begin to develop a picture of the old city in my mind.
In the British Library and back home, I did what all historical novelists do, of course, and spent countless hours researching, seeking to understand 1320s London: its larger governance and structures, but also the small details that make a written account of a place come alive. I have read books on everything from prostitution to waste removal to cock fights and the complicated political machinations of the king, barons and bishops. Some of the most valuable material is that found in documents of the time — usually court rolls and other official documents. The accounts of crimes and their punishment reveal the kind of daily underbelly of life, including brawls and murders, along with shopkeepers convicted of fraudulent dealing with their customers. Alongside this are the records of significant donations to hospitals and almshouses, or the practices of fraternities and guilds in ensuring their members are cared for.
I found, as I did with The Anchoress, that once my research was done, my most important resource was my imagination. We’ll never know exactly what London looked like at that time, but I have a strong visual and aural picture of the streets and buildings my characters inhabited. That gave them a real world to inhabit, and — once I had recovered from my fear of embarking on such an ambitious journey — I found it was great fun!
What moments of the research stand out as great discoveries?
The discoveries were all personal ones.
The biggest surprise for me was the detailed chemistry that was involved in creation of pigments. I had a very basic sense of stone being ground or juice extracted to source colours, but I hadn’t understood how complex and painstaking were some of the processes. It was a reminder to me of how much care the limners took in their work, and of the ways that discoveries and teaching are passed down, refined and passed on.
I was also touched and reminded again of the deep humanity of medieval people, and the extent to which the extremes of life co-existed in the city. It’s easy to assume that, alongside the effects of inefficient drainage and inadequate medicine, the people themselves were bound to be rough and uncaring. But there is plentiful evidence of people caring for each other: the lawmakers setting in place safeguards and services for those in need; the wealthy donating to hospitals and almshouses, and fraternities making sure that their members were provided for in tough times, even down to inviting in strangers to share their meal on a feast day. Similarly, the rich lived alongside the poor; the soaring beauty of architecture, artistry in gold, silver and paint was created within the narrow lanes where the poor and lame might beg outside. This isn’t a new discovery, of course, but it does run against the tendency to paint a period or a place in one single way, as brutish or refined. And it was, for me, a reminder of how much we owe to those from the past. As with my writing of The Anchoress, I realised how important it is to honour the people I’m writing about, even my fictional creations.
What are you working on now? Besides a Bex and a lie down.
I’m currently doing a self-guided crash course in website and all-related-things technology, along with all the little admin jobs I’ve neglected, while pondering the next novel. I have a few ideas forming, and they need some darkness and silence before they’ll come out into the light. But stay tuned …
Well thank you for the discussion of your work.
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