Glasgow University Library Hunter 232 (U.3.5) It is essentially a form of archaeology, but for books.” Pen trials of various letters in the margins of Life of Our Lady. For medieval texts, “a gloss, biblical reference, or some commentary suggests the user was reading the text closely, compared with pen trials which show scribes breaking in a new nib, while other marks and illustrations often give the impression of a bored reader using the blank parchment of the book as we might use scrap paper. “Each time we find an annotation in the margin, the form it takes gives us an insight into the kinds of encounters or interactions those people had with these books,” says Green. There are countless examples of unusual marginalia-monkeys playing the bagpipes, centaurs, knights in combat with snails, naked bishops, and strange human-animal hybrids that seem to defy categorization.īeyond these weird and wonderful illustrations, random doodles from later readers are also significant. In Arderne’s texts the marginalia has a clear purpose, but in other manuscripts the meaning of the drawings can be indecipherable. “Even though you open the manuscript knowing it is a medical text designed for practical use, nothing quite prepares you for seeing a disembodied leg, posterior, or penis pointing at salient parts of the text!”
#Medieval manuscripts snails full
“The margins are full of images of disembodied body parts, plants, animals, even portraits of cross-eyed kings, which relate to the main body of text and act as a mnemonic for the reader,” Greene says.
His textbooks contain ample amounts of delightfully detailed (and occasionally rather gruesome) illustrations. Fortunately, he was also a prodigious illustrator.
Known as the “Father of English Surgery,” Arderne produced several important medical texts in the 14th century. Both can be vehicles for delight, disgust, and befuddlement.Īn example of useful intentional illustrations can be found, for those with a strong stomach and an interest in medieval medicine, in John of Arderne’s Mirror of Phlebotomy & Practice of Surgery, which is located at the Glasgow University Library. There are two broad categories of marginalia: illustrations intended to accompany the text and later annotations by owners and readers. On medieval pages, marginalia can run from the decorative to the bizarre, which Green engagingly documents on her Instagram account. “Both tell us huge amounts about a book’s history and the people who have contributed to it, from creation to the present day.” “And marginalia provide layers of information as to the various human hands that have shaped their form and content.” From intriguingly detailed illustrations to random doodles, the drawings and other marks made along the edges of pages in medieval manuscripts-called marginalia-are not just peripheral matters. 7).Manuscripts can be seen as time capsules,” says Johanna Green, Lecturer in Book History and Digital Humanities at the University of Glasgow. These images are assumed to be representations of human cowardice and could be the inspiration for the knight and snail motif (see fig. These scenes developed and a combination of them is found in a miniature, which shows two frightened men, with dropped swords, flanking a hare and a snail. The other is from Gautier de Metz’s Image de monde where a man standing in fear before a snail. She identifies two different scenes from 13th century art, one from the Virtue and Vices cycle relief sculptures of Notre Dame, Amiens where a man has dropped his sword and is turning to run away from a hare (see fig.
Lillian Randall, author of “The Snail in Gothic Marginal Warfare” written in 1962, connects the scene of the knight in combat with the snail to the theme of cowardice by following a trail of imagery through the middle ages. The snail, in medieval society, was a symbol of exaggerated distrust because the snail carries its house on its back, fearing that its belongings may be stolen, crawling on its stomach as a lowly being, and was deemed a coward. The primary theory of the intended iconography of the snail is that it is a personification of human cowardice.
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