How to interpret medieval marginalia 101
A non-comprehensive and unofficial guide
After perhaps my 9,000th time seeing someone describe medieval marginalia as ‘doodles’ or the product of ‘boredom’, I thought it might be nice to put together a brief guide to some of the themes and ideas that recur in the margins of manuscripts, hopefully helping to showcase the fact that these drawings were usually anything but ‘random’! In fact, far more interestingly, these little characters and scenes were part of a complex and visually dense world rooted in religion, pop culture, humour, and folklore. This is just a whistle-stop tour, but I’d love to add a second part soon.
Context matters
Illuminated manuscripts were essentially always written first and illustrated second in the late Middle Ages. The scribes would add their writing to unbound, empty pages, working carefully around blank fields where painted miniatures and initials would later be added by a separate artist or artists. We do not know exactly what sort of education these artists would have obtained. However, they almost certainly would have had a degree of literacy in their native tongue and a familiarity with the scriptures they were illustrating, even if this did not extend to a firm grasp of written Latin.
Understanding this is crucial for pushing back on the idea of medieval marginalia as ‘random’, since it opens up the possibility of considering marginal drawings in relation to the rest of the page and manuscript as a whole—crucial context that is often neglected when we encounter marginalia as isolated snippets online. Artists were not simply filling in blank voids but adding adornment to a canvas already rich with meaning imparted by the scribe. Thus, the first step to understanding a piece of marginalia should always be to trace it back to its source, if possible. Have a look through the entire work and see what themes and images recur.
Works like the 13th century English prayerbook known as the Rutland Psalter show extensive evidence of the marginal artists playing on specific words and lines from the scriptures featured on the same page. I highly recommend Betsy Chunko Dominguez’ fantastic paper “Playing on Timbrels: The Margins of the Rutland Psalter” for a more complete exposition, but I will go over a couple examples here.
In the lower margin of folio 11r of the Psalter, two men seem to be engaged in a fierce struggle, with one of them apparently trying to rip off the other’s ear. Moving their eyes back up to the start of the opposite page, a reader would have been greeted by the following line from Psalm 5:
Verba mea auribus percipe Domine intellege clamorem meum.
Give ear, O Lord, to my words, understand my cry.
Thus, our marginal brawl becomes a clever pun on the notion of ‘giving ear’—perhaps a way of making the text more engaging and memorable for its reader.
On folio 87v, the artist has extended the letter p from the word conspectu in Psalm 86 (85 in the Vulgate) into an arrow fired from the bow of one monster into the rear end of another.
Conspectu means ‘to behold’ or ‘to consider’, and the famous medieval scholar Michael Camille connected the arrow’s placement to the notion of gaze as a type of visual penetration. One might also consider the entire verse from the Psalm, which reads:
Deus, iniqui insurrexerunt super me, et synagoga potentium quaesierunt animam meam: et non proposuerunt te in conspectu suo.
Arrogant men are rising up against me, O God; a violent mob seeks my life; they do not keep you before their eyes.
In redirecting the word for ‘gaze’ into the supine creature’s rear end, the artist has perhaps emphasised the evils of turning one’s eyes away from God, connecting the two monsters with the violent mob evoked in the text above.
For those who lack an education in Latin, this type of wordplay can be tricky to identify. What may be easier to find are visual parallels between different drawings in a manuscript: the margins could function as a sort of antithesis to the ‘orthodox’ miniatures and initials in the centre of the page. In one 14th century French book of hours, the martyrdom of St Paul in an initial D is reenacted directly to the left by a soldier about to club a rabbit—a humorous elevation of lapine suffering that perhaps emphasises Paul’s innocence.
Other manuscripts show narratives playing out in the margins across multiple pages in a comic-book fashion. The 14th century Smithfield Decretals contains more than a dozen multi-page stories, including those of several saints, naughty priests, henpecked husbands, and a group of rabbits who capture, try, convict, and execute a hunter for his crimes against their kind.
Monsters have meaning
In line with the biblical notion that man had been created in God’s image, the human body occupied a distinct place in medieval humour. As much as we are inherently like God, our bodies give us all sorts of uncomfortable reminders of the gulf between divine and mortal—the flesh has urges and weaknesses, it is impermanent, it rots. And, while Nature creates us according to the pattern drawn by God, she is an imperfect craftswoman, always making at least a couple little errors in her work.
Any deviation from a perfect body was thus a deviation from God’s own image. The physical nature of such a change was inextricable from its moral implications. Half-human and not-quite-human beasts like the lusty centaur and the seductive siren, inherited from classical folklore, had by the Middle Ages long been understood as examples of humanity debased by animalistic impulses. These creatures were used in bestiaries as warnings against letting one’s baser urges take control.
The Christian moral perception of the human body that developed in the Middle Ages further entrenched the role of such monsters, allowing artists to develop them into a visual language of sin and perversion. Thus, we see the margins of manuscripts bursting with hybrid creatures seemingly cut and pasted together from various human, animal, and monstrous forms. A favourite was the gryllus, a creature comprised of little more than a human head atop two legs.
The gryllus is literally (to co-opt a British phrase) all talk and trousers: its head seemingly connects directly to its genitals, or perhaps replaces its genitals altogether. Like the centaur, which is governed by the beastly impulses embodied in its lower half, the gryllus’ mental faculties are located in the seat of its desire. Its role as a deviant is only reinforced by the context in which it tends to be found: in the margins, surrounded by other freaks, hybrids, and backwards beasts, encircling but rarely encroaching upon the word of God at the page’s centre.
A similar anatomical aberration is the image of the demon seen in medieval manuscripts, which often features (among other beastly attributes) a face in the place of its crotch.
Vision, speech, and breath were powerful phenomena in medieval theology, and rightly separated by elevation from the base, carnal activities of the human body’s lower half. The Latin word spiritus, literally the breath, also carried the closely associated meaning of soul, and indeed the mouth was the source of the Word, the satisfaction of spiritual desire. What bubbled and churned in the parts below was best ignored. Sinners were often described as inversions of this natural order, people with their eyes and minds fixated not on the heavens but the dirt. Some stories even depicted the wicked defecating through their mouths. While the Word of God was divinity incarnate, the placement of the demon’s and the gryllus’ faces made it clear that such creatures could only be incarnations of sin and subversion.
God indeed gave man an upright stance of body, it may be in order that this corporeal uprightness, exterior and of little account, might prompt the inward man, made to the image of God, to, cherish his spiritual uprightness; that the beauty of the body of clay might rebuke the deformity of the mind. What is more unbecoming than to bear a warped mind in an upright body? It is wrong and shameful that this body shaped from the dust of the earth should have its eyes raised on high, scanning the heavens at its pleasure and thrilled by the sight of the sun and moon and stars, while, on the contrary, the heavenly and spiritual creature lives with its eyes, its inward vision and affections centered on the earth beneath; the mind that should be feasting on dainties is wallowing in the mire, rolling in the dung like a pig.
—Bernard of Clairvaux, 12th century
Michael Camille highlighted a fixation on anal and scatalogical themes that seems to recur throughout medieval marginalia, and which he connects to the notion of the ‘naughty’ rear end as a subversion of the ‘righteous’ mouth. The butt trumpets sometimes seen in medieval margins thus could be interpreted not just as comic scenes but also as a dig at those who spew the hot air of sinful speech—literally, talking out of their asses. (Perhaps a similar notion also fed into the gryllus’ often prominent buttocks—it, too, is a shit talker.)
It would be hard to argue that late medieval manuscript illuminators, who were generally not monks or nuns but independent, ‘secular’ artisans, were adhering to strict theological principles at all times when producing their work. But the religious culture in which these manuscripts were made helps us get a sense for why images of backwardness, upside-downness, beastliness, and general ‘wrongness’ proliferated in their art.
The world turned upside down
Medieval marginalia proliferated from the early 1300s onward, a time when notions of courtly conduct and chivalry were becoming encoded amongst high society. The joust began to eclipse the mass brawl of the melee as the sole focus at tournaments. The genre of the courtly romance flourished, filled with noble knights and blushing maidens. Hunting, too, became a carefully choreographed endeavour requiring knowledge of the proper rituals, roles, and vocabulary in order to take part.
Even as pageantry and hierarchy became increasingly important parts of life at court, there was (as there always is) the sense that people were living in the shadow of better times. Tournament contestants dressed as crusaders or members of King Arthur’s Round Table, recalling a time when knights had been braver, fought for something that really mattered. In the 14th century, the master huntsman Gaston Phoebus wrote lamentingly of the ever-worsening quality of men, boys, and dogs participating in the great chase. Everything good and pure and noble was slowly draining away, replaced by empty performance.
Since antiquity, writers had used the device of ‘the world turned upside down’ as a means of expressing the ever-degrading state of society. The scholar Ernst Robert Curtius was in 1948 perhaps the first to identify the trope, illustrating it with the example of the medieval poem collection known as the Carmina Burana:
The poem begins as a "complaint on the times": youth will no longer study! Learning is in decay! But—so the thought proceeds—the whole world is topsy-turvy! The blind lead the blind and hurl them into the abyss; birds fly before they are fledged; the ass plays the lute; oxen dance; plow-boys turn soldiers. ... What was once outlawed is now praised. Everything is out of joint.
—Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages
Thus, images like the huntsman and the knight became highly codified symbols in the medieval margins, sometimes played straight but other times turned upside-down. The rabbit becoming the hunter is a classic example: see how the artist of the second image plays on the established imagery exemplified in the first image below.
In fact, the huntsman is rivalled perhaps only by the knight in terms of popularity as a source of parody. The joust, a highly coordinated and performative act, was a favourite subject for marginal artists to skewer (forgive the pun), often by swapping out the rider and/or steed for animals or monsters. In the image below, a second layer of inversion is added by making the rabbit and the hound, traditional enemies, into allies.
However, the knight could also be brought down a peg by making him square up to a snail or some other non-threatening creature, with these confrontations usually ending in his defeat.
Note in this one the rabbit’s sling, drawing parallels with David and Goliath and thus foreshadowing the rabbit’s victory.
While these works might draw on more secular themes, there is a moralising quality to them, too, one that parallels the religious themes of the works they surround. Even as they invite the viewer to be entertained, their inversion of the world’s natural hierarchies is a reminder to the viewer of the ‘proper’ order of things. In the absurdity of the violent rabbit and the dangerous snail is a warning about the absurdity of transgressing those fixed boundaries that keep the universe in place. After all, these creatures are literally marginalised—by virtue of their placement at the edge of the page, away from the depictions of saints, Christ, and heaven, it is made cleari that they deserve to be.
“… and there was much rejoicing” (*cheers*)
Marginalia seen as ‘doodles’? Not a chance! Thank you for such a fascinating article, and so profusely illustrated. I’ve always loved marginalia and seek them out whenever I can. The skill of the artists drawing them is certainly of great quality, and they can be as witty in their innocent medieval way as the artists who worked for Punch or the New Yorker. Thank you for the very memorable picture of a rabbit astride a hound, holding a snail instead of a hawk.