Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art

  • The book is part of the Essays in Art and Culture series.
  • Other books in the series include:
    • The Landscape Vision of Paul Nash by Roger Cardinal
    • Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting by Norman Bryson
    • Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine by Karen Lucic
    • Portraiture by Richard Brilliant
    • C. R. Mackintosh: The Poetics of Workmanship by David Brett

Contents

  • Published by Reaktion Books Limited in 1992.
  • Copyright Michael Camille 1992.
  • ISBN 0-948462-27-2
  • ISBN 0-948462-28-0 pbk
  • Contents includes:
    • Acknowledgements
    • Preface
    • Chapters:
    • Making Margins
    • In the Margins of the Monastery
    • In the Margins of the Cathedral
    • In the Margins of the Court
    • In the Margins of the City
    • The End of the Edge
    • References
    • Bibliography
    • List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

  • The author thanks the staff of manuscript libraries and museums in Europe and the United States.
  • The author thanks those friends, colleagues and students who have discussed the periphery with him:
    • Lilian Randall
    • Lucy Sandler
    • Robert Nelson
    • Linda Seidel
    • Eugene Vance
    • Stephen G. Nichols
    • R. Howard Bloch
    • Malcolm Jones
    • Jonathan Alexander
    • Ross G. Arthur
    • Nurith Kenaan-Kedar
    • Jerry Dodds
    • Paula Gerson
    • Sarah Hanrahan
    • Ben Withers
    • Rita McCarthy
  • The author thanks Mitchell Merback for help with compiling the Bibliography.

Preface

  • The author begins by referencing St. Bernard's question about the meaning of marginal figures in medieval art: lascivious apes, autophagic dragons, pot-bellied heads, harp-playing asses, arse-kissing priests, and somersaulting jongleurs at the edges of medieval buildings, sculptures, and illuminated manuscripts.
  • The author is interested in how these images pretend to avoid meaning and celebrate the flux of 'becoming' rather than 'being'.
  • The author's methodologies combine literary criticism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, anthropology, and art history to match the monstrous nature of the subject.
  • Arnold Van Gennep, an anthropologist of the edge, noted that liminality is ambiguous because it eludes classifications that locate states and positions in cultural space.
  • The first chapter examines the cultural space of margins and how it was colonized with creaturely combinations during the thirteenth century.
  • The author focuses on the function of marginal images as part of the whole page, text, object, or space, rather than just their meaning as isolated motifs.
  • Subsequent chapters focus on the margins of specific sites of power in medieval society: monastery, cathedral, court, and city.
  • These spaces served multiple audiences and were arenas of confrontation where individuals crossed social boundaries.
  • At monasteries and cathedrals, the fringes contain ejected forms and taboos sculpted in stone.
  • In courtly society, the marginal was a mode of entertainment or a means of subjugating the lower orders.
  • A chapter on the medieval city focuses on the visual representation of subjugated urban marginals like beggars and prostitutes.
  • The question of whether medieval artists, working in urban contexts, could do more than 'play' at subversion is posed.
  • The rise of illusionistic space in fifteenth-century manuscript painting coincided with the demise of the Gothic tradition of marginal image-making.
  • While marginal denoted the written page during the Middle Ages, the efflorescence of marginal art in the thirteenth century is linked to changing reading patterns, rising literacy, and the increasing use of scribal records as forms of social control.
  • Things written or drawn in the margins add an extra dimension that can gloss, parody, modernize, and problematize the text's authority without undermining it.
  • The center depends on the margins for its continued existence.

Making Margins

  • Medieval people participated in two lives: official and carnival life.
  • These aspects reflected in 13th and 14th century illuminated manuscripts.
  • Manuscripts include pious illustrations and free designs representing chimeras, comic devils, jugglers, masquerade figures, and parodical scenes, with a strict dividing line between the pious and grotesque.
  • Opening her Book of Hours at Terce, a woman named Marguerite in the 14th century saw herself on the dividing line in the margin of the left-hand page while observing monkeys aping the Magi in the bas-de-page.
  • A spiky-winged ape-angel grasps the tail of the 'D', while a sciapod proffers a golden crown. These all represent the margins.
  • The juxtaposition of a butterfly with a cooking-pot is reminiscent of Surrealism, but medieval marginal art refuses the illusion of a dream.
  • Terms like 'fantastic' and 'grotesque' are inappropriate for describing these creatures.
  • Marguerite might have described her marginal creatures with the Latin terms fabula or curiositates, or babuini.
  • Chaucer used the word babewyn (baboon) to describe a building decorated with 'subtil compasinges, pinnacles'.
  • Isidore of Seville derived simius (ape) from similitudo, noting the monkey's tendency to mimic.
  • The ape, a popular pet, came to signify the dubious status of representation itself, with le singe being an anagram for le signe (the sign).
  • The prevalence of apes in marginal art draws attention to the danger of mimesis or illusion in God's created scheme.
  • Marguerite might have called the things in the margins fatrasies (trash), a genre of humorous poetry particular to the Franco-Flemish region of that time.
  • Fatrasie, consisting of impossible communications despite the comprehensibility of each linguistic unit, are not unlike marginal art.
  • Fatrasie are self-contained and enjoyed by court society as an amusement, whereas the systematic incoherence of marginal art is placed within, perhaps even against, another discourse: the Word of God.
  • The concoction of hybrids seems to have been both a verbal and a visual fashion for elite audiences.
  • There is an unanswered question of what such elevated patrons wanted in this garbage-world.

The World at the Edges of the Word

  • People's fears were exorcised by dumping them on those who inhabited the edges of the known world, who were lesser in some sense.
  • During the Middle Ages the edges of the known world were at the same time the limits of representation.
  • On the World Map in an English Psalter of c.1260, the further one moves away from Jerusalem, the more deformed and alien things become.
  • From the apex of the page, God controls all, while two coiled dragons suggest the space of the 'underworld' at the bottom.
  • The artist has managed to depict fourteen of the monstrous races derived from Pliny who were thought to exist 'at the round earth's imagined corners including bleymae, cynocephali, giants, pygmies, and sciapods.
  • Illuminators were often not inventing monsters but depicting creatures they might well have assumed existed at the limits of God's creation.
  • Most models of the cosmos, society, and literary style were circular and centripetal. The safe symbolic spaces of hearth, village, or city were starkly contrasted with the dangerous territories outside of forest, desert, and marsh.
  • The realms of the unknown began just over the hill.
  • People were also highly sensitive to disorder and displacement because they were so concerned with the hierarchy that defined their position in the universe.
  • Schemas included those who prayed, fought, and labored, the free and unfree, religious and lay, city and country dwellers, and women and men.
  • The medieval organization of space was territorial. The thirteenth century was the period of arable expansion that reclaimed much marginal land for enclosure to increase seignorial revenues.
  • This control and codification of space created a space for ejecting the undesirable - the banished, outlawed, leprous, scabrous outcasts of society.
  • Betwixt and between are important zones of transformation. The edge of the water was where wisdom revealed itself; spirits were banished to spaceless places; temporal junctures between winter and summer, or between night and day, were dangerous moments of intersection with the Otherworld.
  • Openings, entrances and doorways, both of buildings and the human body, were important liminal zones that had to be protected.

Images in the Early Middle Ages

  • Most of the visual art that has come down to us from the early Middle Ages was made for God. All else was the Devil's.
  • St. Boniface complained about worm-shaped ornaments on ecclesiastical vestments that induced lechery, depravity, shameful deeds, and disgust for study and prayer.
  • In the Book of Kells, the Word of God itself became a habitation of dragons.
  • In the Chi-Rho monogram page, the Greek letters that spell out the name 'Christ' form visual riddles and magical knots.<