For elite audiences in the late Middle Ages, the act of reading was often as much about contemplating pictures as it was about consuming texts. Imagery and texts in richly illustrated, intricately designed one-off volumes may structure, reinforce, gloss, explicate, vivify, inflect, and even challenge or contradict one another, enriching and complicating the messages they were intended to convey, and, by extension, the reader-viewer's experience of them. Careful selection and editing could shade illustrated texts and captioned pictures toward the timeless or the topical. Indeed, as scholarship on the medieval illustrated book has richly demonstrated, examination of the relationship between word and image in any single example may reveal “a space of intellectual struggle, historical investigation, and artistic/critical practice,” as W. J. T. Mitchell put it, and thus may suggest the conditions of an artifact's crafting as well as its reception.

These ideas have resonance with respect to the Queen Mary Psalter (BL MS Royal 2 B. VII), among the most impressive English manuscripts of the fourteenth century. The Psalter is exceptional not only for its sheer bulk and pictorial abundance – 319 folios displaying over 800 images – but also for its harmonious design, lavish production, and rich presentation of Christian salvation history. The manuscript opens with an Old Testament preface covering Creation through the story of Solomon, after which follow four full-page miniatures detailing the lineage and kin of Jesus in the male and female lines and the prophetic and apostolic foundations of the faith. A Sarum calendar embellished with narrative imagery of the monthly labors and zodiac signs precedes the Latin psalter, canticles, and litany, texts that are framed and articulated by eighty-seven full- or half-page miniatures depicting the Life of Christ and Christological, Marian, eschatological, and devotional themes as well as twenty-three historiated initials at the main text divisions. The lower margins of every folio of these texts display drawings – 464 in total – comprising several thematic series, including bestiary themes, Marian miracles, hagiographic narratives, combatant grotesques, and vignettes of courtly and urban entertainment, material that extends the Psalter's program into the realm of contemporary aristocratic ideals and experience.