This study examines the nature of illustrated texts, particularly medieval manuscripts. The aim is to test the idea that words and pictures in a text signify in the same ways, and to investigate what this means for the reading of particular texts. The manuscripts selected for the study were The Harley Psalter, The Old English Illustrated Hexateuch, and the Marvels of the East from the Anglo-Saxon period, and the Ellesmere Chaucer for the Middle English period. The selection was made with an eye to covering several genres within one limited time period, and then to ascertain whether any conclusions remained valid when the time period was extended.

Three reading strategies are applied to both verbal and pictorial parts of the texts. The first, reading schemata, is normally used for pictorial material; the second, reading metaphoric tropes, is normally applied to verbal material; the third, reading the spatial construction of ideas, is comparatively neutral. The readings are informed as much as possible by the cultural context which produced the texts.

The study shows that one can indeed read both verbal and pictorial texts by means of these three strategies. Moreover, the kinds of readings generated by these strategies reveal that there is no stable relationship between words and their illustrations, but that the relationship changes according to the material itself. Although the strategies were the same in each case, the focus produced by the strategies for each manuscript study was entirely different: an androcentric bias for the Harley Psalter, ideas of time and narrative for the Hexateuch, the controlling gaze of the reader for the Marvels, and questions of orality and literacy for the Ellesmere manuscript.

Often the reading changes profoundly with the addition of illustrations. In many cases, ambiguities inherent in the verbal text are resolved by illustrations; however, illustrations can also create ambiguities. Also, the extent to which a reader performs an act of reading which is interiorizing or exteriorizing is a function of both words and pictures.