Medieval Marginalia: The Hidden World in Manuscript Borders
In the margins of medieval manuscripts — alongside the sacred text, in the white space between the holy words and the edge of the vellum — a completely different world exists. Knights fight giant snails. Rabbits hunt men. Monkeys perform surgery. A fox preaches to a congregation of geese. Women joust on the backs of deer. These images, produced by the same craftsmen who painted the exquisitely reverent sacred miniatures on the page's interior, have puzzled scholars for centuries. Were they satirical commentary? Decorative space-filling? The private jokes of scribes weary of copying holy text? Invocations of popular folklore? All of these explanations have been proposed and none entirely satisfies. What is certain is that the medieval mind that produced these images inhabited a world in which the sacred and the absurd were not opposites — in which the space around the holy could be filled with the unholy, and the juxtaposition was not considered blasphemous but somehow appropriate. ...