Marginalia and the medieval mind
Subversive space in Gothic art
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Marginalia and the medieval mind
Subversive space in Gothic art
For me, one of the most interesting facets of medieval art is the emergence of marginalia – the little illustrations in the margins of illuminated manuscripts.
Earlier art doesn't really have these margins. Byzantine and late classical manuscripts, for instance, generally have single large illustrations, often neatly contained within a panel. Anglo-Saxon and Irish art is similar – manuscript pages are formal, with such illuminations as portraits of the evangelists often inside an architectural frame. It’s not till the late twelfth and early the thirteenth century that marginalia appear – at the same time as the rise of the Gothic style.
Foliage borders develop from the earlier interlace. I can't help thinking these foliage borders with their neat little leaves are linked to the architectural development of the ‘stiff leaf’ and ‘water leaf’ capital. And within the foliage, little figures appear – often, complete little scenes which appear to bear no relation to the subject of the text itself.
In sacred texts such as Books of Hours the marginalia often mix the profane with the sacred. The Luttrell Psalter, for instance, dated about 1320-40, contains scenes of ploughing and harrowing, a doctor inspecting a flask of urine, and corn being cut, as well as dancing bears, wrestlers, and a wife beating her husband.
You might think these scenes are meaningless; just pretty pieces of observation, scenes to amuse an idle moment. But in fact, they may well have a deeper meaning. For instance Lillian Randall traced some of the typical scenes found in the margins of manuscripts to ‘exempla’, stories used in sermons by preaching friars. (It’s interesting that the growth of the preaching orders dates from the early thirteenth century – the same time that we start finding marginalia. Are the two connected?) Often, the illustrations in the margin can be tracked down to proverbs, fables, or bestiaries - in most cases with a moral meaning added to the story.
The marginalia operate in a different way from the text and its illustrations, but they can be used to throw light on that text. They might reinforcing the meaning of the main text, or give it a particular inflection.
Now there’s a nice example of this not in a manuscript, but in the glass in York Minster, where one of the windows (the ‘Pilgrimage’ window) has little scenes of monkey medics examing urine flasks, and a monkey’s funeral, in the borders. On one level, the monkey funeral is a parody of the funeral of the Virgin Mary. But we might also see a message about spiritual health – souls are saved by pilgrimage, with Christ as the good Physician, whereas the monkeys are false medics. In cases like this you could even see the marginalia as a kind of medieval hypertext, creating meanings that are hidden to the unlearned or inattentive.
If we look at marginalia in a medieval way we might well see them as metaphors rather than just pictures of day-to-day life. For instance imagery of the agricultural cycle in the Luttrell Psalter would have recalled the “labours of the months” - not just odd observations of country life, but a sequence of scenes that show the cycle of the year and that, specifically, show the natural cycle under God’s providence.
Marginalia are an odd space. In some ways, they’re subversive. When we see a little man baring his backside in the margin, we might easily believe that the rule of the Church is being subverted. But in fact, that space has been deliberately created to hold this content. The tangled forest has been held back, so to speak – given a garden fence. And we can laugh at the man’s bare arse, because we are allowed to do so – by the illuminator, very likely a monk (at least in the early days, before artists such as the Limburg brothers and Jean Pucelle took over). 
Marginal space also exists within architecture and within the furnishings of many churches. For instance the choir screen and choir stalls are often places where carvers allowed themselves to include typical ‘marginal’ subjects such as monsters, scenes of daily life, and satirical fables. That’s particularly true of the tip-up seats known as misericords, where we find subjects such as the mice hanging the cat, women beating up their husbands, and Reynard the fox preaching to the geese. In the choir stalls at Winchester cathedral there are falconers, hunters, a Saracen with his round shield, and monkeys. And green men - – perhaps the most controversial ‘marginal’ subject in architecture, with some scholars claiming the green man as symbol of the resurrection, others claiming him as a pagan survival. At Amiens, the arm rests of the stalls are decorated with figures of traders and burgesses – the laundrywoman, the carpenter, the architect, the candlemaker, even a little bagpipe player.
It’s debatable how far we can read specific symbolism into these marginalia, though. There are two extremes of interpretation. Early twentieth century scholars looking at manuscripts dismissed the marginalia as ‘whimsy’, irrelevant, meaningless distractions. On the other hand some nineteen
th century architects aimed to read each and every carving as a symbol of Christian doctrine – which may overdetermine the significance of the imagery. Probably, the truth is somewhere between the two.
Perhaps we should instead of trying to give each single motif a meaning look at the page or the cathedral overall and the place of the marginalia within that structure. And then we’ll be able to read the subtle individual messages best – while enjoying the ambiguous space of licensed subversion that the margins represent.
Andrea Kirkby
The images on this page are taken from a Golden Bull of 1400, by the Master of the Wenzel Workshop. We show the whole page, and a selection of the marginalia including realistically depicted birds and a wild man.