This article examines descriptions of artistic activities found in late medieval French literary works, comparing these textual descriptions with visual evidence to recover a vocabulary of creative agency. Authors, reacting to the creative activities they witnessed around them, refashioned terminology found in earlier literary accounts of image-making and developed a set of terms to describe and define the creative process. They focused on one quality in particular as crucial to the artist: engin. To say that an image-maker had a remarkable engin implied that he or she possessed tremendous powers of memory and imagination--abilities more highly valued than even the most developed manual skill, or artifice. Owing to their ability to produce sacred images from memory, exceptional image-makers were believed to possess a virtuous, almost saintly, character. By establishing these concepts in the minds of their courtly readers, late medieval French authors created conditions in which ambitious image-makers could showcase their particular skills and abilities.
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Stephen Perkinson (2002) studied this question.