May 14, 2014
"Such political theorizing [of a manuscript's images] may lie in the 'official,' francophile design of the miniatures, but it is worth noting that the policies of a French king who died in 1314 were probably less salient to the early fifteenth-century English public than was the parlous state of the current King of France, Charles VI. Charles's periodic bouts of insanity had left him basically unable to rule at all, let alone formulate consistent policies."
-Joyce Coleman, "The First Presentation Miniature in an English-Language Manuscript," in The Social Life of Illumination: Manuscripts, Images, and Communities in the Late Middle Ages (2013)