THE WRITING BEHIND THE WALL: TEXT AND IMAGE IN LATE MEDIEVAL CHURCH DECORATION Madeleine Gray, FSA Madeleine Gray, Faculty of Creative Industries, University of South Wales, Pontypridd CF37 1DL, Wales. Email: madeleine.gray@southwales.ac.uk The relationship between text and image in later medieval art is complex and has a growing litera- ture. Wall paintings in two churches in South Wales suggest ways in which text could inspire sophis- ticated programmes of paintings. At Llandeilo Talybont, a sequence telling the story of the Crucifixion through the Instruments of the Passion relates to medieval devotions to the Instruments and to read- ings from the Holy Week liturgy. At Llancarfan, a medieval satirical poem on fashionable clothing and a verse translation of the life of St George suggest links between the wall paintings of Death and the Gallant, the Seven Deadly Sins and St George. Apparently random collections of wall paintings may therefore reflect a process of interaction between public art and public knowledge of texts. Keywords: medieval art; wall paintings; macabre; St George; Seven Deadly Sins; Wales The relationship between word and image in later medieval art is a complex subject and fruitful for debate. The sequences of late medieval wall paintings in two churches in South Wales throw light on several aspects of this complexity. In order to engage with them, it is necessary to place their use of explicit and implicit text in a wider context. It is no longer tenable to regard the visual imagery in the medieval church as libri lai- corum, books for the illiterate. Stained glass, tomb carvings and wall paintings are far too complex and contain far too much text to justify this assumption. Athene Reiss has argued that wall paintings do not do what a book would have done: they do not present doctrine effectively, they do not tell stories coherently. Rather, they are designed primarily to stim- ulate devotion.  It is, however, possible to argue that, while wall paintings are not designed to act as text, they do respond to an awareness of text. Textual sources may in turn explain the coherent thinking behind apparently random choices of subjects for wall paintings. These sources may appear as text in the paintings, or they may be implicit, and they may reflect instruction or devotion. There was clearly an awareness of the importance of written sources, even among those who did not have the skill to decode the written word. While the dissemination of texts through reading and reciting is difficult to track, it should not be underestimated.  There was a wide range of gradations from ‘litteratus’ to ‘illiteratus’, with implications . Reiss . . On the importance of reading aloud, and awareness of text among those who could not read for themselves, see Trapp . The Antiquaries Journal, , pp – © The Author(s) . This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/./), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. doi:./S https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003581521000408 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 54.82.85.91, on 08 Feb 2022 at 11:49:40, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at