Images in the Margins Book

This book is a gem. It features marginalia, which are deliberate illustrations rather than doodles by bored scribes, from medieval and early renaissance manuscripts. It's packed with photographs of the most fascinating illuminations on the topic, and the accompanying text is very insightful. The complaints scrawled in the margins always cracked me up, so I would have liked to see some doodles added spontaneously by the scribes forced to toil monotonously in the scriptorium in the cold, damp, and dark. But the marginalia is still very interesting for all its deliberateness. My favorites are the breastfeeding mermaid from the Alphonso Psalter (page 45), the noble ladies reading from the Bute Psalter (page 16), the fire-breathing wyrm chasing a person up the letter "I" from the Bute Psalter (page 10), and the face-pulling fool from the Bute Psalter (page 64) who also graces the cover.

There are three broad categories for marginalia. In the first, the drawings overflow from a miniature narrative scene. These often depict religious worship or everyday life as well as events described from the text. In the second, they are inspired by a word or phrase or theme from the text. And in the third, they are completely unrelated to anything else in the manuscript either text or illumination. This third category is the best kind as they often add a bit of risque humor or fanciful imagery. Here is where one will the hybrids, nondescripts, half human and half animal, plant, or undetermined being. People in the medieval world weren't as stodgy as they are portrayed in popular culture. They pushed back against the Church's dominance whenever they dared with the bawdy and the profane, and they enjoyed a dirty joke as much as contemporary folk.

Anyone who loves illuminated manuscripts will enjoy this book -- simply to look at if for no other reason. If you're new to the world of illuminated manuscripts, Christopher De Hamel's A History Of Illuminated Manuscripts and Scribes And Illuminators and the section on medieval manuscripts Scribes, Script, and Books: The Book Arts from Antiquity to the Renaissance are a good place to start.