Marginalia Art
What is marginalia?
Marginalia are essentially cartoons that were found in the margins of prayer books and other manuscripts in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when books were bound by hand and the pages had a large amount space around the intended text. As Dr Bovey notes, the images were “often funny, sometimes rude, obscene or absurd” and had “no meaningful relationship to the texts they accompany.
Medieval marginalia refers to the bizarre, humorous, and sometimes obscene drawings found in the margins of illuminated manuscripts from the 12th to 15th centuries. While the main text often dealt with religion, politics, or law, the edges became a playground of wild creativity—featuring everything from rabbits killing knights to nuns picking penises from trees.
Marginalia originated in university towns like Oxford and Paris, where young scribes, students, and clerks, often bored by bureaucratic copying, turned to satire and absurdity with ink and imagination. Encouraged (or at least tolerated) even in church offices, these illustrations captured the strange and often hilarious realities of medieval life.
Key Characteristics of Marginalia
- Absurd Role Reversals: Rabbits hunt humans, cows milk women, snails have lynx heads—order flipped on its head.
- Satirical Humor: Clergy, nobility, and social norms were frequent targets of mockery.
- Crude & Obscene Elements: Bare bottoms, genital trees, and grotesque creatures appear often.
- Mixing Themes: Comedy beside tragedy, monsters beside angels—nothing was off-limits.
- Carnival Spirit: Like medieval festivals, marginalia let the world turn upside down—if only in the margins.
- A Reaction to Boredom: Born in the halls of bureaucracy, these doodles were medieval office humor.
- Distraction Warnings: Some believed marginalia illustrated the dangers of spiritual or scholarly distraction.
Why It Still Inspires
Medieval marginalia continues to fascinate because it reveals a side of the Middle Ages that’s raw, rebellious, and hilariously human. It inspires:
- Modern design (T-shirts, tattoos, memes)
- Games (like Inkulinati, based entirely on marginalia creatures)
- Satirical art and illustration
Unlike the polished surface of official medieval art, marginalia celebrates imperfection, irreverence, and chaos. It reminds us that even in an age of plagues and piety, people still laughed, questioned, and drew very weird things.
Just How Absurd Are We Talking?
Very. We're talking:
- Serpents that grow into trees
- Goats with pink horns
- Monkeys mooning monks
- Men with fish tails and wings
- Snails jousting knights
- A figure that looks suspiciously like Yoda... centuries before Star Wars
Medieval marginalia wasn’t a glitch in the culture. It was a secret outlet—a chaotic, satirical, and deeply human art form that refused to stay silent in the margins.