Mapping the Readable Household

Abstract

London, British Library MS Royal 18.D.ii, a mid-fifteenth-century English manuscript, is best known as the sole illuminated copy of Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, its images added to the text in the early sixteenth century after its acquisition by the Percy family. These were not the only additions made to the text in the first quarter of the century, however. The manuscript, which had previously included only Lydgate’s Troy Book alongside the Siege, was expanded between 1516 and 1527, following its acquisition by the fourth earl of Northumberland, Henry Percy, and after it had been passed to his son the fifth earl, Henry Algernon Percy. These additions include a metrical chronicle of the Percys and copies of additional verses painted on walls and ceilings of the manors and buildings in two estates owned by the Percy family in Yorkshire. The latter form the particular interest of this essay, notably for how they connect reading and architectural space, for the way these connections function to shape the authority of the Percy family, and for how they enable recognition of a late medieval secular mode of contemplative, domestic pilgrimage enacted through embodied reading.