Drimmer, “Unnoticed and Unusual: An Illustration in a Manuscript of John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes,” Journal of the Early Book Society 20 (2017): 209-18.

Drimmer, “The Disorder of Operations: Illuminators, Scribes, and John Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” LIAS 44 (2017): 5-28.

This essay argues that late medieval manuscript producers were both aware of and at times troubled by the ontological ambiguity of the medium in which they worked. Nelson Goodman’s aesthetic philosophy provides an apt framework for characterizing this ambiguity, which rests on the manuscript’s dual status as both an allograph and an autograph. Emb…[Read more]

Drimmer, “The Painters of Late Medieval London and Westminster,” Burlington Magazine CLIX (2017): 445-49.

This article examines a manuscript in the British Library that offers one of the earliest known illustrated dictionaries of Egyptian (pseudo)hieroglyphs produced in Early Modern Europe. The c.1507 book was based on a manuscript that purports to define Egyptian hieroglyphs and which was found on a Greek Island. It was translated and written by an…[Read more]

This article proposes that the responsibility for literary failure in a manuscript culture could lie with the manuscript itself. During the later Middle Ages, writers’ acts of composition and presentation established goals by which a form of non-commercial success may be measured, and traces of manuscript owners’ activities in books index the ach…[Read more]

Drimmer, “Questionable Contexts: A Pedigree Book and Queen Elizabeth’s Teeth,” in Scholars and Poets Talk about Queens, ed. Carole Levin and Christine Stewart-Nuñez (New York: Palgrave, 2015), 203-224.

A prayer roll made for Margaret of Anjou (1430–1482), queen consort to Henry VI of England, has received little attention despite its production for a queen Shakespeare called the “shewolf of France.” Previous descriptions have characterized the roll as a conventional display of female piety and evidence of Margaret’s devotion to the Virgin…[Read more]

Many medieval manuscripts suffered from antiquarian zeal during the eighteenth-century revival of interest in medieval art: enthusiasts often augmented their own albums and private collections by removing attractive illuminations from manuscript pages, leaving wounded books in their wake. Less familiar is the restorative work of their…[Read more]

Drimmer, “Picturing the King or Picturing the Saint: Two Miniature Programmes for John Lydgate’s Lives of SS Edmund and Fremund,” Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, 1350-1550: Packaging, Presentation, and Consumption, ed. Cayley and Powell (Liverpool University Press, 2013), 48-67.

Drimmer, “Visualizing Intertextuality: Conflating Forms of Creativity in Late Medieval ‘Author Portraits,'” in Citation, Intertextuality, and Memory, vol. 2, ed. Di Bacco and Plumley (University of Liverpool Press, 2013).