Isabella of France

Narrative or episodic sequences appear in the marginal spaces of several manuscripts illuminated in England and France in the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In a group of English prayerbooks they occur on nearly every folio, drawing the viewer from one page to the next through the potency of their storytelling. These scenes do not illustrate the Latin prayers, although in many cases careful study unveils connections to nearby words. Rather, their narrative connections provide a visual focus that, for the lay patrons for whom most of these books were made, may have been of more immediate interest than the prayers themselves. This essay begins to explore these
sequences by examining the ways in which they draw a viewer from page to page, beyond the heavily-decorated incipit pages that signal the start of each text section, into the textual wildernesses of subsequent pages.

Nigel Saul was the first to note Richard II’s obsession with burying favoured courtiers close to his tomb at Westminster Abbey. What is less well-known is that the king was in fact copying a practice established some fifty years before by his great-grandmother, Isabella of France, in the great Franciscan church by Newgate in the city of London. This essay examines the commemorative programme of Queen Isabella and to consider this as a precedent for the subsequent popularity of courtly burials and monuments at Grey Friars church.