Notice also the snake-like monsters coiled around the ascender of the letter ‘h’: a very common trope in manuscript illumination.Īs long as writing has existed readers have marked particularly significant passages of text in a variety of ways. In the margin of this thirteenth-century French Bible (left), a man appears to be juggling knives, while at the top an archer has shot an eagle. For anyone interested in pursuing these ideas further, there are suggestions for further reading below. They may have been intended to subvert or question the text, to serve as aids to contemplation and visual cues for memory and recollection, or simply to entertain bored readers. 154v (detail).ĭrolleries often occur in what would appear to be inappropriate contexts, and there are several theories to account for their presence in the margins of religious books, for example. The beginning of Deuteronomy in a 13th-century Bible. This manuscript has been heavily cropped, resulting in the mutilation of many images. Below the text of the opening of the French Romance Mort Artu (Death of Arthur), a nun suckles a monkey, while an archer emerges from a spiky tendril to shoot at a bird. Drolleries and grotesques abound in the margins of the Rylands Haggadah. They are common in the margins of texts, either incorporated into the illumination, or added by early readers. Grotesques are fantastical or comic figures, often combining elements of human and animal forms. 15r (detail).ĭrolleries are amusing figures or scenes, often depicted in the margins of a manuscript, or within an initial letter. Cadels decorate the top margin of this manuscript of the Wycliffe Old Testament English MS 82, f. Could this be a subversive commentary upon monarchs in general, or the English monarchy in particular? We cannot be sure in this case, but it is certainly true that many illuminated medieval manuscripts contain subversive decorations in the margins. In this Wycliffe Old Testament, there many examples of cadels in the books of Kings, some wearing crowns. 42b (detail).Ĭadels are decorative flourishes on letters, sometimes turned into human faces or grotesque shapes above the text. The minute dots are individual hair follicles. Text and pattern combine as micrography in the borders of the Rylands Haggadah.

Flourished initials extend into the margins, while the top line of text may be decorated with flourishes and contorted into human heads. Text can be embellished and elaborated into beautiful and bizarre forms. Likewise, it is not straightforward to differentiate text and imagery. While some forms of marginalia were clearly planned, if not executed, by the original scribe or printer, the process of book production in manuscripts and early print cultures did not have a clear cut-off point: it was customary to decorate early printed books, for example, and the transition from production to reception was gradual and ambivalent. However, one of the delightful aspects of marginalia is that they defy easy categorization. We can analyse and classify marginalia in various ways: text versus imagery contemporary decoration and annotation as opposed to later additions. Today we don’t encourage students to mark our books in any way, but a whole academic industry has developed around historical marginalia and what they can tell us about how books were used, and how readers have engaged with books (and each other) over generations. Realms, nations and places (Top)A couple of public close-up sessions recently have prompted these random musings on marginalia – the text and images that occur in the margins of manuscripts and printed books.

Paul the Deacon - historian (8th century) I follow though a lots of blogs and i've tried to record their URL:s into my 'I follow' page.īertrand de Born (viscount and troubadour) NOTE: this is a secondary blog so I can't follow you back under this name even I would like to. In addition I collect links to translated medieval manuscripts. Mainly illuminations, mosaics, frescoes and other works of art from era 500-1500. THEME: A page related to medieval history and culture.

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