Mind the gap: how we forgot late Medieval English illumination

English artisans made huge numbers of manuscripts after the Black Death, and thousands remain extant today: all the medieval copies of Chaucer's, Langland's, and Gower's works, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, every Wycliffite Bible, and much, much more. Well over a thousand of these manuscripts are illuminated, that is, are heavily decorated. For all that plenitude, however, fewer than a handful of scholars have ever specialized in late medieval English illumination, and this mass of art goes almost entirely unregarded by medievalists today. We routinely ignore 150 years of illumination, even while minutely examining every other element of these manuscripts. Such a gap is extraordinary, and this talk explains how it came to be, and how it has been maintained for over a century. By the end, perhaps, we will have learned how to see late medieval English illumination, and having begun to notice it, will begin imagining ways we might study it, whether we are art historians or not.