The importance of patience and the danger of information overloadI was trying to come up with some very-patient-money long-term investment projects and kept coming back to the Cathedral builders of the high middle ages.
So on arrival this morning I asked the Google "What's new in medieval scholarship?"
In addition to "Financing Cathedral Building in the Middle Ages: The Generosity of the Faithful" and "Financing Cathedral Construction: The Political Economy of One Type of Social Overhead Capital" we find this article on marginalia at Collectors Weekly. I'll be back with more on long time-horizon investments next week.
Flipping through an illustrated manuscript from the 13th century, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Jesus loved a good fart joke. That’s because the margins of these handmade devotional books were filled with imagery depicting everything from scatological humor to mythical beasts to sexually explicit satire. Though we may still get a kick out of poop jokes, we aren’t used to seeing them visualized in such lurid detail, and certainly not in holy books. But in medieval Europe, before books were mass-produced and reading became a pastime for plebes, these lavish manuscripts were all the rage—if you could afford them. The educated elite hired artisans to craft these exquisitely detailed religious texts surrounded by all manner of illustrated commentary, known today as marginalia.
Kaitlin Manning, an associate at B & L Rootenberg Rare Books and Manuscripts, says part of the reason why modern viewers are so captivated by marginalia is because we expect this era to be so conservative. For example, few Monty Python fans realize that the comedy group’s silly animations are direct references to artwork in illuminated manuscripts. (Illuminated simply means decorated with gold or silver foil.) “I think it’s such a shock when you have this idea in your head of what medieval society was like,” says Manning, “and then you see these bizarre images that make you question your assumptions.” The wild mixture of illustrations is a challenge to our contemporary desire to compartmentalize topics like sex, religion, humor, and mythology.
Manning was first drawn to marginalia while studying at the Courtauld Institute in London, where she was able to work with some of the most significant illuminated-manuscript collections in the world, including those at the British Library. “I loved the idea that marginalia was such an overlooked part of the medieval experience,” says Manning, “so much that up until 20 or 30 years ago, scholars were completely uninterested and wrote it off as trivial or not meaning anything.”
Though the meaning of specific images is still hotly debated, scholars conjecture that marginalia allowed artists to highlight important passages (or insert text that was accidentally left out), to poke fun at the religious establishment, or to make pop-culture references medieval readers could relate to. We’ll probably never understand all the symbolism used in marginalia, but what have we learned about medieval life through these absurd images?
We recently spoke with Manning about the origins and hidden meanings behind this fantastic art form.
Top: Wild animals at war in the Breviary of Renaud and Marguerite de Bar, Metz ca. 1302-1305. (British Library, Yates Thompson 8, f. 294r.) Above: A typical page from the Rutland Psalter shows a variety of decorative marginalia. (British Library Royal MS 62925, f. 99v.)
Collectors Weekly: How is marginalia defined? Kaitlin Manning: Generally speaking, marginalia simply means anything written or drawn into the margins of a book. In the medieval context, marginalia is understood to mean images that exist outside or on the edge of a page’s main program. But the term is also sometimes applied to other arts, like architecture. It can describe sculptural details that might seem grotesque or nonsensical to modern eyes. Gargoyles, for instance, could be thought of as a kind of marginalia.
The heyday of marginalia was between the 12th and 14th centuries, more or less. The printing press is said to have been invented in 1450, but that’s just a convenient estimate. Printing wasn’t widespread until the end of that century, and before the use of the press, books were made by hand from start to finish. Traditionally, it was the job of scribes in monasteries who would painstakingly copy and decorate each volume, either for the use of the church or for influential patrons. Although examples of marginalia can be found all over Europe, England and Northern France were particularly productive centers for this kind of art.
The prevailing view for most of the 19th and 20th centuries was that marginalia was nonsensical, unserious, profane, and had nothing to do with the sacred images it surrounded. It was only relatively recently, due to the work of scholars like Michael Camille and Lillian Randall, in particular, that marginalia became viewed as a genre worthy of study in and of itself. Camille has suggested that marginalia emerged from the tradition of the gloss, which is an explanatory note that helps elucidate difficult passages in the text. A gloss wasn’t a footnote; it was actually written into the margin, either in the original language of the book or in the vernacular....MUCH MORETwo wild and crazy headless guys in the Summer volume of the Breviary of Renaud and Marguerite de Bar, Metz ca. 1302-1305. (Verdun, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 107, f. 99v.)
