Like a Cabbage Patch Kid, But Sexier (Mmm… Marginalia #76)

I don’t know much about Charlotte of Savoy, Louis XI of France’s* queen and the mother of Charles VIII.**  But the Pierpont Morgan library owns a book of hours commissioned for her, and man she sure did enjoy a side order of naked people with her daily devotionals.  Oh, the naked people in these margins!  So many of them!  And so often… growing out of flowers for some reason.  Like so:

And so:

Not sure what it all means, except that she had very specific tastes.  Oh, and so my readers who swing the other way don’t feel left out, here you go.  It’s not just naked ladies:

*Louis XI was apparently nicknamed “The Universal Spider” by his subjects, which I hereby declare the most awesome royal nickname ever devised.
**And the Internet is being unhelpful tonight, so the only fun fact I have to offer about Queen Charlotte is that the putrefaction residue from her bones was recently studied under a microscope by a team of forensic anthropologists and other specialists.  So if you were worried this post might be too sexy, that fact should balance it a little for you.

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