Sorry I’ve been away so long, folks.  Blame Sid Meier.  But in repayment, today you’ll get three marginal illustrations for the price of one,* one in the morning, another noon, and one final one at night.  That should make up for the last two virtual-conquest-blighted weeks.

Scenes of horseback nobles and hounds coursing after hares and stags or men returning from the hunt are so common in medieval manuscripts that we hardly bother to index the straight versions.  It’s only when the illuminator riffs on the standard pattern that we pay attention, such as in the various hunts of the hares I’ve featured here before. Can you spot the riff in this version found in the lower margin of a page of the famous Bodleian Alexander manuscript (MS Bodl. 264)?

[continue reading…]

I finally got my birthday Kindle in the mail yesterday.  Hooray!

I didn’t realize it until I got one, but when Kindles go into sleep mode, they display one of twenty-five preloaded screensaver images.  And the first one mine showed me? Behold:

The two greatest innovations in publishing this year.

A black and white reproduction of the first page of the gospel of John from the Lindisfarne Gospels.  Here’s a much bigger and colorer copy of the same: [continue reading…]

The blog has seen a lot of traffic from bibliophillic circles lately, thanks to a well-traveled pair of posts from a few weeks back. So I thought in recognition of all that attention, I’d offer my new readers a little tip.

Are you, like St. Margaret of Antioch,* plagued by unwanted dragons? Worried they’re going to just swallow you whole again right after God has miraculously delivered you from their bellies? Don’t be! Just take a cue from the illuminator of Joffroy d’Aspremont’s Psalter (Bodleian Library MS Douce 118):

One well-placed holy Bible, and all your dragon-related worries instantly vanish. Let him try swallowing virgins with a mouthful of scripture.** [continue reading…]

My, my, how time flies. Labor Day once again? Time to celebrate our labor with a day of idleness.  The medievals would not be pleased.  For them, labor and idleness–ahem, I mean Labour and Idleness–were mortal enemies squabbling over the soul of Everyman.*  Or, at the least, standing around being all symbolic while the soul of Everyman** sauntered by.  Like so:

That’s Labour in the center of the panel futzing around with a net, with Idleness on the right, holding a lure.   [continue reading…]

Welcome to September, everyone.  According to medieval calendars, September is the month of Libra, the scales, usually represented as a pair of scales hanging off of something or carried by someone.  Like so:

Medieval astrologers held that the planet Venus rules Libra, so those born in Libra were thought to be lucky in love and particularly attractive to members of the fair sex.   [continue reading…]

There’s something fishy about the Starbucks logo. Aside from the obvious, I mean. I know the black and white lady inside the green circle is supposed to be a mermaid and, yes, mermaids are half-fish, half-woman, but I meant that there’s something else fishy about it. In other words, I smell a cover-up. Aside from the obvious cover-up, I mean. I know that the original logo featured the mermaid’s bared breasts and, yes, they got covered up in later redesigns of the logo. But something else is being covered up. In other other words, I smell a rat.* [continue reading…]

As promised, this week we return to the bas-de-pages* of British Library MS Royal 10 E, AKA the “Smithfield Decretals” for a quick lesson in unicorn ecology.  As you might have heard, there’s only one surefire way for humans to hunt a unicorn.  But on the off chance you haven’t, here’s a quick primer: what you need above all else is a willing maiden who’ll sit serenely in a meadow or forest clearing where unicorns are known to frolic.  While the maiden does her thing, grab a long spear and go hide behind a tree until a unicorn happens upon the aforementioned maiden.  Since unicorns cannot resist laying their heads in the laps of maidens, all you have to do is wait for the proper time and let loose with the pokey spear.  Like so:

All this is so well-known as to be almost unworthy of mention at all–so imagine my surprise when I discovered the illuminator responsible for the pictures in the Smithfield Decretals advanced a wholly novel method of unicorn dispatching.  Bears! [continue reading…]

As many a gizmodian* and slashdotist has had occasion to point out recently, the title of my post on medieval book curses–“Medieval Copy Protection“–was a bit misleading, for book curses were not meant to dissuade anyone from copying the book that bore them or to protect the authors of the texts within from having their intellectual property “pirated”.  They were instead meant to protect the owner of the physical copy of the book from losing it to a thoughtless biblioklept.

But to say that the curses were meant primarily to protect the book’s owner is still a little misleading, so allow me to clarify further.  Most medieval books don’t have curses in them, and most of the curses in medieval books don’t seem to have been requested by the person who commissioned the book they’re found in.**  Instead, these curses usually are found in the book’s colophon, the optional notes added to the end of a manuscript by the scribe who copied it.  It’s in the colophon where you find things that today might be included in the mostly blank pages at the front of book–the when, where and by whom of its production.  Here’s a (boring) example from British Library MS Burney 310:

It reads: [continue reading…]

The hunt of the hares is a recurring motif in the margins of medieval manuscripts, one I discussed here some time ago. For a quick refresher, the motif is just your average scene of hunters and hounds chasing rabbits with the principles reversed so that its the rabbits hunting the most dangerous game of all, etc. But this series of images from the lower margins of the British Library’s MS royal 10 E IV* takes rabbit vengeance to the next level. We begin with a rabbit taking down a hunting hound with a volley of arrows:

You might think the hound is done for, but the marksmanship of the rabbit is Robinhoodian; the hound is merely wounded until he’s weak enough to be captured by the rabbit and his buddies and tied up: [continue reading…]