ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses one example of readerly intervention, and the questions it raises about authenticity, in a fifteenth-century Burgundian manuscript of a text called the Roman de Buscalus. The Burgundian credentials of Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France, MS fr. 9343–9344 are further enhanced by the fact that the manuscript is the product of the Lille workshop of the artist known simply as the Maitre de Wavrin. Experienced in the way by contemporaries, then, the premodern "graffiti" found in manuscripts and early printed books is not to be viewed as a criminal practice or an iconoclastic act of defacement like the work of the modern spray-can artist. The graffitied miniatures—at first so shocking to see in a luxury manuscript book—shed light on how the images and the text that contains them worked at the court of Burgundy and beyond; and, in so doing, they lend an authenticity—an aura—to the manuscript.
