1. Introduction: Medieval manuscript as a visual text All texts are inherently visual: before we decode the linguistic message inscribed within the graphic (or alphabetic) symbols, we perceive the shapes, sizes, and colours of the letters and their arrangement on the page. The visuality of the text is reinforced by bibliographic codes that break the familiar linearity of the textual layer, such as changes in font type and size, shifts in the arrangement of text columns on the page, or the superimposition of nonalphabetic symbols onto a string of letters. This inherent visuality was also a defining feature of manuscript culture, with the manuscript page requiring from the reader negotiating a number of mutually dependent graphic elements: letter shapes and sizes, ink colours, rubrics, running heads, marginal comments, catchwords, images, abbreviation symbols, etc., the sum of which totalled the meaning of the text (or page). As argued by Carroll et al. (2013: 55), the visual elements of the historical text influence its meaning in manners comparable to the impact that the social or situational context have on historical spoken interactions (as mediated through written records) and so the appearance of the page is "crucial to the [medieval] reader's construal of meaning". Thus, the manuscript communicates to the reader through an interaction of text and image on the one hand, and, on the other, through the organisation of visual content on the page (Jucker & Pahta 2013: 3). 2. Visual pragmatics Rapid development of digital humanities has revealed the need for a partial reorientation of scholarly approaches to the study of historical texts: integrating the methodology of traditional humanities with tools linked with computing and digital publishing has not only allowed an unprecedented access to medieval manuscripts in the digitised format (not infrequently accompanied by an elaborate electronic descriptive-analytical apparatus) but it also highlighted the importance of the visual contexts of historical texts. Access to digitised images, created, maintained and analysed via computing tools also enabled a broader application of historical pragmatic methods to "reconstruct patterns of correspondence between communicative functions and visual forms and contextual reasons for selection between alternative forms" (Carroll et al. 2013: 56). Expanding the investigative perspective, traditionally oriented towards palaeography and codicology, towards a more inclusive, interdisciplinary approach (i.e., one combining the tools and methods of book history, manuscript studies, traditional philology, historical pragmatics and discourse analysis) permits a better understanding of the ways in which medieval readers made sense of the manuscript page. This relatively new field of inquiry is visual pragmatics, or pragmatics of the page, which centres on the manuscript page as the object of study. The text, i.e., "a concrete instance of writing" (or print, for that matter), "generated by producers of texts (from authors to printers) in specific communicative settings, to serve the needs of specific consumers" (Carroll et al. 2013: 66-67), functions as an "utterance" in the visual pragmatic analysis. Such analysis focuses on graphic elements on the manuscript page in their functional contexts (or, in the pragmatic terminology, functional domains). From this perspective, visual cues such as colour of the ink, size and type of script, punctuation or abbreviations are equivalent to pragmatic markers, aiding the communicative effectiveness of manuscript discourse. The following part of this paper will examine the functional domains of selected visual-pragmatic markers in BL Royal MS 18 D II, containing Lydgate's Troy Book and Siege of Thebes as an aid in a better understanding of the mechanics of the visual text (cf. Machan 2011). 3. Context: Royal MS 18 D II as a socio-historical and cultural object British Library Royal MS 18 D II is a mid-fifteenth-century parchment codex, containing John Lydgate's Testament, Siege of Thebes, and Troy Book, alongside verses by William Cornish, John Skelton, William Peeris and other minor pieces. …