Iconography and the Professional Reader (15th ed.)

Oxford Bodleian Library Douce 104 is the only extant manuscript of William Langland’s fourteenth- century poem Piers Plowman that is both illustrated and annotated, thereby providing material evidence of interpretation by professional readers-the artists, scribes, and annotators who constructed the work’s meaning in an early fifteenth-century Anglo-Irish colonial context. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Denise L. Despres examine this evidence for what it can tell us about the politics of late-medieval