Join her in New York City May 13 for the next installment of her book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain. The Aberdeen Bestiary, One of the Great Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts, Now Digitized in High Resolution & Made Available OnlineĪyun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Medieval Cats Behaving Badly: Kitties That Left Paw Prints … and Peed … on 15th Century Manuscripts Killer Rabbits in Medieval Manuscripts: Why So Many Drawings in the Margins Depict Bunnies Going Bad I like to imagine a monk drawing out his fantastical daydreams, the snail being his nemesis, leaving unsightly trails across the page and him building up in his head this great victory wherein he vanquishes them forever, never again to be plagued by the beastly buggers while creating his masterpieces. The snail’s reign of terror in the garden (not so symbolic, perhaps…)Ī practical-minded Reddit commenter offers the following commentary: Virtuous humility, as opposed to knightly pride The high clergy, shrinking from problems of the church
Other theories that scholars, art historians, bloggers, and armchair medievalists have floated with regard to the symbolism of these rough and ready snails haunting the margins: knight motif disappeared in the 14th-century, only to resurface toward the end of the 15th, when any existing significance would very likely have been tailored to fit the times. Whatever point-or joke-the scribe was making, it’s been obscured by the mists of time.Īnd these things have a way of evolving. Let us remember that the doodles in medieval marginalia are editorial cartoons wrapped in enigmas, much as today’s memes would seem, 800 years from now. Royal 10 IV E (aka the Smithfield Decretals ) Dolittle so unafraid of the Giant Pink Sea Snail?)ĭetail from from MS. Which rather begs the question why the knights going toe-to- …uh, facing off against them in the margins of these illuminated manuscripts look so damn intimidated. Their profession conferred power of a sort, the kind that tends to get one labelled cowardly, greedy, malicious … and easy to put down. Randall, who found some 70 instances of man-on-snail combat in 29 manuscripts dating from the late 1200s to early 1300s, believed that the tiny mollusks were stand ins for the Germanic Lombards who invaded Italy in the 8th century.Īfter Charlemagne trounced the Lombards in 772, declaring himself King of Lombardy, the vanquished turned to usury and pawnbroking, earning the enmity of the rest of the populace, even those who required their services. Randall’s 1962 essay “ The Snail in Gothic Marginal Warfare.” Boars, lions, and bears we can understand, but … snails? Why?ĭetail from Brunetto Latini’s Li Livres dou TresorĮdwards favors the one in medievalist Lilian M.
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