In her final portfolio project, sophomore Lauren Bayerl reimagines four premodern works—the Old English “Ruin” elegy, Andreas Capellanus’ Art of Courtly Love, Marvell’s “To his Coy Mistress,” and Haywood’s Fantomina—as modern book covers. Her artistic talent and creativity are on full display as she navigates key questions about these works and their reception: How was the text received in its time? What about today? How does a book cover capture a reader’s attention? What can a cover reveal about the text within? How do covers themselves engage with genre-specific expectations?
Below we have included each of Lauren’s covers along with her commentary. Any of her covers would find a happy home on the shelves of our local book store!
For the first time period that we covered in class, pre-conquest Britain, I decided to focus on the topic of elegies. For the modern interpretation of the cover of “An Elegy of Place,” I took several factors into account. The ruins that the author describes in their work are depicted in the illustration of a burning building. Though a fire did not necessarily destroy the city that the author describes, the symbolism has a strong correlation with the text. As the building on my cover burns, three birds emerge from the flames in different stages: one dark bird, one slowly gaining flashes of color, and the final emerging as a fiery phoenix. In “An Elegy of Place,” the author laments the lost city that they never knew while simultaneously finding a sense of beauty in the ruins. In my version of the cover, the emerging phoenix represents this beauty from the city’s destruction that the author found so noteworthy.
For the second time period that we covered, post-conquest medieval Britain, I decided to pour my focus into the week covering “The Invention of (B)romantic Love,” particularly Andreas Capellanus’s “The Art of Courtly Love.” In this work, Capellanus describes over thirty “rules” to love and successful relationships; much of this advice would be considered outdated now and is filled with contradictions, while many of these negative “tips” still linger in our culture today. For this modern cover, I formatted it much like a book from the For Dummies series. This is very much due to the fact that Capellanus lays out what he believes to be the secret to a perfect love and how to achieve this relationship. It reminded me greatly of today’s self-help and instructional texts, so I modeled it after one of the most famous examples of a modern how-to book.
The Renaissance, the third era that our class covered this semester, was filled to the brim with talk of carpe diem and living in the present. For this period, I decided to illustrate a modern cover of “To his Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell. I utilized the style of an art motif common to the time: the often “double-decker” cadaver monuments. In this case, the top casket contains a still-living depiction of Marvell’s lover that he describes in the poem. The bottom later of the tomb contains her skeleton, slowly draining the years from her living self. She holds a flower in her hands, a symbol of her current beauty and purity in life. The flower is also causing her hands to drip blood, an indication of how holding onto this fleeting state could negatively impact whatever is left of her life, which is represented to be cut short abruptly by the rest of the blood in the drawing. Marvell’s poem being a classic example of living in the present, this cover illustration stresses that idea with a grim reminder of the lover’s—perhaps near—future.
In covering the final era of our studies, the restoration and the eighteenth century, I chose to illustrate the novel Fantomina by Eliza Haywood. In the original cover, Haywood nicknames the story “Love in a Maze,” an idea that I borrowed from heavily in this drawing. The vizard that the main character of the story famously chooses as her final disguise appears as the focal point, its features divided up into a maze that can actually be completed. This cover serves as a way of making the story more interactive: just as the protagonist dodges the multiple obstacles to carve her path and creates several love affairs with the man she loves, the reader can similarly navigate the twists and turns of the cover and find their way out. The complexity of the idea and simplicity of the style and color scheme is also intentional. Throughout Fantomina , the protagonist weaves complex stories of the backgrounds of each of her characters, with the only thing keeping her true identity a secret being as simple as the skill of her acting. This modern interpretation of the cover stresses this idea as well.
Lauren Bayerl is a sophomore double-majoring in English (with a concentration in writing, rhetoric, and literacy) and biology (pre-medical concentration). She has a wide variety of interests, though she hopes to one day become a published author while working in her chosen career. On campus, she enjoys participating in BuckeyeThon, helping students in physiology as a “Phys Phab,” and serving as a curriculum co-chair for the First Year Leadership Initiative. In her spare time, she can be found drawing celebrities, writing and reading, spending time with friends (over the phone, for the time being), or over-analyzing her favorite television shows.