MAKING MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPTS FULL

This would help those with a knowledge of Latin find the relevant section. “Bubo” is both the Latin word for owl, and the word to describe swelling from rectal cancer.

Public Domain Arderne engages in some Latin wordplay with this drawing of an owl.

Glasgow University Library MS Hunter 251 (U.4.9) Swordfights and spearing what looks like a giant fly, early 14th century. Glasgow University Library Hunter 232 (U.3.5) A disembodied penis in a basket in the margin’s of Arderne’s treatise. Glasgow University Library MS Hunter 251 (U.4.9) Possible children’s doodles of two peacocks (one unfinished, at left, and one with a human rider, at center), from Life of Our Lady. Public Domain An illustration of a medical procedure from Arderne’s treatise. Glasgow University Library MS Hunter 251 (U.4.9) A collection of animals and hybrid creatures. Public Domain A portrait of King Edward III from Arderne’s treatise. They are, by turns, silly, dramatic, and puzzling-but always illuminating about the way scribes and readers connected with the texts. It is adorned with pages of doodles from the 16th century: “illustrations of dogs, defecating goats, peacocks with stick-figure riders, boats with tiny passengers aboard, and other marginal marks that look like very young children’s scribbles.”Ītlas Obscura has compiled a selection of doodles and drawings from medieval manuscripts. If the idea of doodling in a book either appeals to you or repulses you, then consider the pages of a copy of the long 15th-century poem Life of Our Lady, by John Lydgate. Glasgow University Library Hunter 232 (U.3.5) It is essentially a form of archaeology, but for books.” Pen trials of various letters in the margins of Life of Our Lady. For medieval texts, “a gloss, biblical reference, or some commentary suggests the user was reading the text closely, compared with pen trials which show scribes breaking in a new nib, while other marks and illustrations often give the impression of a bored reader using the blank parchment of the book as we might use scrap paper. “Each time we find an annotation in the margin, the form it takes gives us an insight into the kinds of encounters or interactions those people had with these books,” says Green. There are countless examples of unusual marginalia-monkeys playing the bagpipes, centaurs, knights in combat with snails, naked bishops, and strange human-animal hybrids that seem to defy categorization.īeyond these weird and wonderful illustrations, random doodles from later readers are also significant. In Arderne’s texts the marginalia has a clear purpose, but in other manuscripts the meaning of the drawings can be indecipherable. “Even though you open the manuscript knowing it is a medical text designed for practical use, nothing quite prepares you for seeing a disembodied leg, posterior, or penis pointing at salient parts of the text!”

MAKING MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPTS FULL

“The margins are full of images of disembodied body parts, plants, animals, even portraits of cross-eyed kings, which relate to the main body of text and act as a mnemonic for the reader,” Greene says. His textbooks contain ample amounts of delightfully detailed (and occasionally rather gruesome) illustrations. Fortunately, he was also a prodigious illustrator. Known as the “Father of English Surgery,” Arderne produced several important medical texts in the 14th century. Both can be vehicles for delight, disgust, and befuddlement.Īn example of useful intentional illustrations can be found, for those with a strong stomach and an interest in medieval medicine, in John of Arderne’s Mirror of Phlebotomy & Practice of Surgery, which is located at the Glasgow University Library. There are two broad categories of marginalia: illustrations intended to accompany the text and later annotations by owners and readers. On medieval pages, marginalia can run from the decorative to the bizarre, which Green engagingly documents on her Instagram account.

Making medieval manuscripts