Building on the previous chapter, the goal here is to summarize and explain to the reader the conventions followed by Byzantine illustrators when illuminating Gospel lectionaries, particularly focusing on initials, marginalia, and miniatures. The chapter explains how the formulaic opening lines of the Gospels were illustrated and what types of images were selected for the initials, all which stress the speech of Christ or the Evangelists. The chapter also articulates how these types of illustrations (initials, marginalia, and miniatures) operated differently from one another and were tasked with carrying different types of information for users. Defining the relatively strict and cohesive rules by which which scribes and illuminators played with the written text and images allows the reader to better appreciate diversions and exceptions that were complexly deployed to comment and reflect on the meaning of the text.

Focusing on recitation and manuscript culture, this chapter opens the book by looking at the manner in which homilies would have slowly unfolded in meaning and comprehension in the minds of listeners during the church service. Studying the syntax and grammar of a Byzantine homily, the point is made that oral texts such as homilies or the Gospel reading could be variably understood given the slow pace of chanting and recitation. With these lessons in mind, the chapter turns to the introduction of illustrated initials into Byzantine manuscripts, which occurred in the post-iconoclastic period during the ninth century, particularly in the contexts of books of homilies. The aim is to understand the oral and aural valences of illuminated initials and marginalia in manuscripts, which came to define how they operated: not as static pictures, but rather as images informed by the act of reading and the complex way in which meaning reveals itself with oral texts.