Alexandra Day considers the ubiquity of manuscript marginalia in medieval texts. Perhaps they offer psychological insights that can help us to appreciate the art of this stereotyped period in history?
Picture the scene. It’s 4:17pm and that seminar is currently well underway. You don’t hate it, you don’t love it, you’re really just showing up because you have to. You’re stuck watching the minutes tick away agonisingly slowly in the corner of your neighbour’s laptop screen. Another student is delivering a ‘presentation’ which meanders on and on, neither interesting or comprehensible. You decide that writing some notes would help you focus. So, you uncap your pen and start scrawling down some phrases that stand out from the monotonous drone.
Minutes pass before you realise you have begun to doodle in the margin of the page; a few spirals, a goofy face, a crooked little house with a chimney belching out scribbles of soot. Maybe even a ‘Super S’, depending on how tedious the class is getting. Now that you’ve started, you may as well add to this burgeoning masterpiece. It’s certainly more productive than listening to whatever’s being said. You begin to elaborate on the scene, dreaming up a bizarre little narrative to go along with it, creating an escape for yourself in biro and A4 notepaper. The minutes pass, the class ends and you leave; forgetting all about this mundane moment of invention.
A few days later, you come back to write something else in the notepad and catch a glimpse of your doodles from the seminar. Curious to see what your past self was into, you decide to take a closer look. A stickman standing on a dog. An eye with a spiral for a pupil. What were you thinking? It must have been a very boring class. You tear out the page and stuff it into the nearest bin.
Now, picture this scene. The year is 850 AD. A monk sits alone in a dimly-lit damp stone cell with nothing but a sheet of vellum and a few stocky rats for company. The sun has risen and set, and the monk has made only three sentences of progress into transcribing the Gospel of Luke. He cares about the work but it’s been a long day with very little excitement. His mind begins to wander. A sigh, a few curving strokes of red ink, a pair of eyes and a simple one line smile. A fish with legs forms in the upper margin of the page. What does this have to do with the gospel? It’s not intruding on the text too much, so he decides to leave it there; maybe someone will take it as a reimagining of Scripture.
Images like the aforementioned bipedal fish can be found scattered throughout the margins and texts of innumerable medieval manuscripts. For example, a paragraph of text from a Decretum Gratiani [a collection of Canon law compiled in the twelfth century] dating back to c.1345 depicts a nude female figure riding a forest green eel like a rodeo cowboy. Sometimes the picture is a few simple lines, other times these ‘bas de pages’ have been treated with the same elaboration and detail as the ‘real’ illuminations in the manuscript.
The range of subjects to be found in marginalia is incredibly diverse. The only limit to what could be done outside the prescribed boundary of illumination and text was the imagination of the monk. Some highlights of ‘bas de pages’ imagery include images of dogs dressed as pilgrims, headless bodies playing the drums and an elephant carrying a box of monks. Certain marginalia subjects were more mundane; amateurish self portraits of the artist, or depictions of the rats that populated the monastery.
Just like the contemporary copybook, the margins of the manuscript offered illuminators and scribes a place to empty out their thoughts and feelings. The margin was a border into an unconventional and unexplored region of imagery where the unusual prevailed. This theme is echoed in medieval maps of the world, where the unknown territories of the map were populated by figures and creatures not unlike those found in the margins of manuscripts. For example, in the Hereford Mappa Mundi (c.1300), the outer reaches of the known world are populated by one-footed giants and beings with faces in their chest cavities. So why include them in a supposedly accurate map?
Indeed, the inclusion of giant snails with dog heads and rabbits dressed as monks alongside sacred images of the Crucifixion and other Biblical stories have perplexed modern viewers for centuries. Are they satirical? Are they secret blasphemies? Or are they simply the doodles of a bored artist? Maybe they are all of these things. Rarely do we know who created the images, as they were almost never signed. Would you autograph a doodle? The anonymity of the drawings creates a certain mystery, allowing us to interpret their meanings (and their creators) as we see fit.
We can say with reasonable confidence that not all marginalia was entirely random. Often they offered monks a means of expressing their views on clerical life and monastic hierarchies in a clandestine way. Images of monkeys and donkeys dressed in the clothing of bishops and abbots were a not-so-subtle jibe at the establishment of the church, discreetly slipped in amongst the pages of the books used by the very same men. These echo the sly caricatures of rivals and enemies which are so often passed around classrooms today.
Like so many doodlers whose drawings are found on desks and bathroom stalls, the monks responsible for marginalia were fond of a bit of toilet humour. Indeed, images of animals and humans urinating and defecating in all manner of methods and locations abound in the margins of illuminated manuscripts. One of the more dramatic examples of this can be found in the Gorleston Psalter (c.1310 – 1324), which included a monk defecating into the very first illuminated capital of Genesis! The explicit nature of these sketches can come as a surprise to modern viewers. Encountering the bare behind of a crudely drawn devil in the midst of a text concerning the salvation of the soul may be unexpected, but perhaps the shock really comes from the realisation that these artists were more like us than we care to imagine. Though lowbrow, these images reveal as much about the medieval mind as the lengthy, bone dry texts which fill the history section of the library.
It is all too easy to get lost in the differences in dress, language and belief which made up the medieval world. The fact that so little was recorded of daily life means that the majority of modern knowledge of that time concerns only a small, elite section of society. Furthermore, the remarkably different style of visual art can appear alien and unfamiliar to the modern eye, making it difficult to interpret and connect with. This lack of a feeling of common humanity is perhaps exacerbated by the fact that the middle ages are so often mythologised. As children especially, we encounter the period in fantasy books and games, presented as a time peopled with magical humanoids and mythical creatures rather than ‘real’ people we can relate to. Manuscript marginalia remind us that the people of the past were indeed humans like ourselves, merely separated from us by a few centuries.
Manuscript marginalia challenge the preconceived ideas many people hold about medieval art. Ever since the Renaissance, the society of the medieval era has been the butt of many unfair, generalised tropes. The stereotypical image of the medieval person as a God-fearing, filthy, barbarous peasant is ubiquitous throughout film, television and history textbooks. Given that so few written sources exist that concern the personal thoughts and daily habits of people in the era, it can be difficult to imagine who they were. The diversity of imagery found in manuscript marginalia and often very crude humour used reveals that the medieval mind wasn’t solely consumed by prayers and the plague. Medieval people got bored and doodled to pass the time. They laughed at fart jokes and imagined fantastic creatures and worlds beyond their own. It was not a black and white world of stringent piety and death. The realisation that the psychology of medieval artists was more like ours than we have commonly imagined can help modern viewers appreciate medieval art in all its complexity. Though the society in which we live may be remarkably different, people as a whole are not.
