Material Features: Illuminations

The Vast Army features large, illustrative drop caps on each opening chapter page. A drop cap is a large capital letter that serves as both a decorative flourish and a way to indicate the beginning of a paragraph, chapter, or section. First appearing in approximately the 4th century, drop caps were created to delineate new ideas before the invention of spaces, punctuation, paragraph breaks, minuscule and majuscule letters [1]

The drop caps in The Vast Army have swirling floral designs that are reminiscent of drop caps seen in Gothic-style manuscript illumination. The Gothic style first appeared around the early 12th century in northeastern France as an antithetical response to Romanesque artwork [2]. The art style was originally meant to emulate the flowing contours of tree branches [3]. This contributed to Gothic artwork having a naturalistic, whimsical style, with an emphasis on grace and fluidity. The Vast Army's floriated drop caps recreate this elegance and fluidity, with the blossoming vines gently framing around the drop cap letter.

Compare the 19th-century illuminations of The Vast Army with the Gothic manuscript illuminations from 14th-15th-century France. Notice how the illuminations in The Vast Army are much less ornate compared to its hand-drawn Gothic predecessors. Such elaborate illustrations would have been incredibly expensive and virtually impossible to reproduce on a mass-production scale. Therefore, the illuminations in The Vast Army are constrained by the limits of production in favor of accessibility and convenience. This is in comparison to handwritten manuscripts, which have much more artistic flexibility, but would have been exceptionally time-consuming to produce. 

[1] Franz, Laura. 2012. “Drop Caps: Historical Use.” Smashing Magazine. April 4, 2012. https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/04/drop-caps-historical-use-and-current-best-practices/.

[2]Lichmanova, Elena. 2025. “The Nature of Gothic.” Blackburn Museum. September 25, 2025. https://www.bl.uk/stories/blogs/posts/the-nature-of-gothic.

[3] Reeve, Matthew M. 2012. “Gothic.” Studies in Iconography 33: 233–46. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23924286.