Multimodal analysis of Middle English manuscripts: examples of compared textual and iconographical narrations

With this study I intend to develop the application of modern theories of multimodal communication to a corpus of medieval manuscripts written in Middle English. Multimodal analysis can be effectively applied especially to narrative texts featuring a pictorial cycle illuminating the related events, but it is applicable to others genres as well. This work will illustrate the peculiar communicative dynamics existing between two communicative modes (image and word) and their structural visual arrangements. Through the application of this kind of analysis, the manuscript medium appears again as a whole, a system of semiotic resources linked by multiple relations, showing modern communicative dynamics.