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The preference for physical action in the miniatures in this manuscript especially activates these sensorimotor skills. As reader-viewers “see-in” to the miniatures, they make spaces for moving, gesturing figures and their interactions, and they understand those figures to have weight and three-dimensional substance. Further, the frequently employed device of extending elements of the image beyond the frame pushes the figures forward off the flat surface and into the reader-viewer’s space. Although Noë assumes the perspectival depth that most western art constructs, the miniatures in this manuscript ask also for what we might call “seeing-out.” This device reinforces the immediacy of the action in part by creating the illusion that the bodies depicted are co-present with the reader-viewer’s body. Sensing the overlapping as generative of space, the reader-viewer contemplating the miniature of the Judgment of Solomon experiences the figures of the true mother and child as pushed farthest from the frame and closest to herself. The frailty of an infant and its need for caring and wise mothering thus become concerns that the miniature forcefully communicates to the reader-viewer at the basic level of perception.
A cognitive approach to the Cracow manuscript must also take evolution seriously, as literary scholar Brian Boyd does in evocriticism, the approach he develops in On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction . In answering the question of what an evolutionary perspective might offer the student of narrative, Boyd answers that it “can stress the importance of attention itself, so often taken for granted in literary criticism. . . ." Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 215. Attracting and maintaining attention to their narrative is the “storytellers’ first problem.” For Boyd, “attention precedes meaning, although an emerging intuition of meaning may also feed back into our interest in the story.” Boyd, 384. Those who designed and made the Cracow manuscript chose to attract the reader-viewer’s attention first through images—the facing full-page miniatures I have just discussed—thereby giving priority of place to the visual narrator whose depictions continue to appear throughout the manuscript. As we have seen, the first full-page miniature presents the protagonist of the narrative—Mary, with her child Jesus—as the apex of a centuries-long sequence of generation; it establishes their lineage. The next introduces text, not yet in the author’s long rhymed poems but in the deceitful mother’s direct speech, which raises anxiety about the survival of a child. Both genealogy and children were of great import to every noble family, aware of and proud of its ancestors and intent on continuing the line through the successful production of offspring. It is virtually certain that such a family commissioned the Cracow manuscript, and that its designers knew what would attract their clients’ attention.
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