Merton History of the Book Group Meeting

A Book for a Boy?   A New Look at the Bodley Alexander

Professor Sarah McNamer, Georgetown University

The splendidly-illuminated Bodley Alexander, which makes up the first and most substantial part of Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 264 (Part A, fols. 3-208), is one of the most celebrated and delightful books to survive from late medieval Europe.  Made between 1338 and 1344 in the Low Countries, this compendium has been called “the ultimate Alexander romance, a kind of verbal and visual summa Alexandriana.”  Current scholarship holds that the volume was made for one of three kings, David II of Scotland, Edward III of England, or Philip VI of France. 

Through a new reading of the bas-de-page scenes and the detection of an embedded game hidden within the decorative programme, this talk presents evidence that the book was made not for a king, but for a young prince – specifically, for Lionel of Antwerp (1338-68), son of Edward III and Philippa of Hainault.   The book can thus be regarded not only as a multimodal speculum principis for a boy, but a medieval version of a modern picturebook genre for children, the search-and-find book (Where’s Wally, I Spy). 

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