ABSTRACT
T he evidence for the techniques and organization o f book production in England in the la te r m iddle ages is e ith er to be found in the m anuscripts themselves or to be deduced from o th e r so u rc e s . T h e p a p e r th a t I d e liv e re d to th e f irs t K resge Symposium in 1986 was concerned with page design and decoration in fifteenth-century English m anuscripts, based on the evidence of certain surviving m anuscripts.1 T he paper began with a discussion of the stages in the decoration of a finished manuscript, exemplified by the partly com pleted borders o f a copy of Trevisa’s Polychronicon in the H unting ton Library .2 I argued, by analogy, that aspects o f page design m ight becom e established through a series o f largely m echani cal decisions m ade by scribes and illuminators. Such decisions m ight m anifest themselves in the recycling o f iconographic elem ents ,3 in apparently awkward jux tapositions o f styles o f m iniatures and bor ders,4 or by the inclusion o f m iniatures for the simple expedient of filling up spaces that would otherwise have been left b lank .5
