illustrations in the margins of medieval manuscripts

Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: the Margins of Medieval Art, Reaktion Books, 208pp, £16. The margins of illuminated manuscripts, as those of buildings and artworks, are frequently seen as the irruptive space of transgressive behaviour or thought.The late Michael Camille has in this book helped us to see the overlooked and how even those somewhat higher up the social scale, the scribes and illuminators, exploited their marginality in the margins. Yet, as these two pages from the Maastricht Book of Hours (around 1300-25) shows, a gent or lady need not have been relentlessly serious, but could combine fun with prayer – in the margins we see two musicians providing dance music for a man and a woman throwing some shapes in the bas de page. The practice, however, was especially popular between the 13 th and 15 th centuries. Drolleries are amusing, often grotesque, figures drawn on the edges of manuscripts and may be found in works from different parts of Europe throughout the Middle Ages. Here the illuminators focused their attention not on the serious and high-minded matters of the painted pages or initials, but on that lowest level of society, the laboratores who seldom got a look-in, compared to the upper-crust, oratores and pugnatores. This profusion of humans, animals, fantastical plants and grotesques painted in the margins of thirteenth and early fourteenth-century Europe manuscripts was common. A drollerie (also spelled as drollery) is a type of marginalia found on Medieval manuscripts. Lascivious apes, pot-bellied monks, harp-playing asses, arse-kissing priests and somersaulting jongleurs abound, but have hitherto been mostly passed over or dismissed as mere decoration or mindless doodles. July 22, 2016, 5:47 AM The margins of a medieval manuscript from a convent in Naples, Italy, are decorated with doodles of what are apparently devils, a farm animal and a person that were likely. However, there are some odd additions found in the margins of.

Such creatures are somewhat ambiguous, representing either rabbits or hares. There is a hunter in the upper-left corner, attempting to capture prey that is facing away from him, obliviously enjoying the flowery meadow.

On the margins of medieval manuscripts (and beneath misericords in church chancels) there is evidence that, in the all-encompassing Age of Faith, there was some dissent or perhaps more accurately fun-poking at the elders and betters of the day. Illuminated manuscripts are beautiful works of art commonly associated with the Middle Ages. More puzzling than the main illustration is what we see in the accompanying margins, which depict a medieval hunt. In modern times the term illumination denotes the illustration and decoration of early manuscripts in general, whether or not with gold.

Illustrations in the margins of medieval manuscripts