You can see more marginal scenes of the rabbit’s revenge at Sexy Codicology, Colossal, and Kaneko-James’ blog. Given how often we denizens of the 21st century have trouble getting humor from less than a century ago, it feels satisfying indeed to laugh just as hard at these drolleries as our medieval forebears must have - though many more of us surely get to see them today, circulating as rapidly on social media as they didn’t when confined to the pages of illuminated manuscripts owned only by wealthy individuals and institutions. Then, of course, we have the bunnies making their attacks while mounted on snails, snail combats being “another popular staple of Drolleries, with groups of peasants seen fighting snails with sticks, or saddling them and attempting to ride them.” It can describe sculptural details that might seem grotesque or nonsensical to modern eyes. But the term is also sometimes applied to other arts, like architecture. We see this in the Middle English nickname Stickhare, a name for cowards” - and in all the drawings of “tough hunters cowering in the face of rabbits with big sticks.” In the medieval context, marginalia is understood to mean images that exist outside or on the edge of a page’s main program. Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.This enjoyment of the “world turned upside down” produced the drollery genre of “the rabbit’s revenge,” one “often used to show the cowardice or stupidity of the person illustrated. Why Knights Fought Snails in Illuminated Medieval Manuscripts The Flute of Shame: Discover the Instrument/Device Used to Publicly Humiliate Bad Musicians During the Medieval Period Listen to a Recording of a Song Written on a Man’s Butt in a 15-Century Hieronymus Bosch Painting See several more examples here and learn more about Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts here. The butt trumpet, however, is just objectively, crudely funny, probably as much to the artists who drew them as to those of us, hundreds of years later, encountering them for the first time.

Literate or not, Medieval Europeans spoke a language of symbols that stood in for whole folk traditions and theologies. But the few readers in this manuscript culture would have recognized the references and allusions, although, like all signs, the illustrations communicate several different, even contradictory, meanings at once.Īnd what of the butt trumpet? It is “likely shorthand to express disapproval with, or add an ironic spin to, the action in the text.” The butt trumpet, ladies and gentlemen, is as advertised: that most venerable of expressions, the fart joke, to which there is no witty reply and which-as scatological humor can do-might be slyly subversive political critique. The unicorn, which can only be killed with its head in the lap of a virgin, might stand for sexual temptation or the sacrifice of Christ. The porcupine picking fruit from its spine could represent either devil or savior, depending on context. These associations weren’t always so clear, especially when they were explicitly religious. Rabbits, for example, represented lust, and their music-making was a virtuous sublimation of the same. They were allegorical figures descended from the menageries of Medieval bestiaries, repeated thematically to represent human vices and virtues. The animal motifs in marginal illustrations were neither aimless doodles nor inside jokes. The animated video lesson at the top by Michelle Brown “explores the rich history and tradition of illuminated manuscripts” in their eccentricity and seeming silliness. While Bosch painted his nightmarish cacophonies, Medieval scribes’ cats peed and left inky footprints on 15th century manuscripts, within whose illustrated pages, rabbits play church organs, valiant knights do battle with giant snails, and a naked man blows a trumpet with his rear end (a precursor to the man in Bosch’s painting with a flute stuck in his rear.) “These bizarre images,” TED Ed notes, “painted with squirrel-hair brushes on vellum or parchment by monks, nuns, and urban craftspeople, populate the margins of the most prized books from the Middle Ages.” As 21st-century readers are used to the minimalist layout of today’s printed books, many of us feel a huge disconnect with the layers of seemingly-unrelated imagery visible in so many illuminated medieval manuscripts.

Yes, life could be brutal, bloody, disease-ridden, but it could also be absurdist and unintentionally hilarious, qualities that reach their apex in the weirdness of Hieronymus Bosch’s “painful, horrible” musical instruments in his Garden of Earthly Delights. Marginal drollery, about 12601270, via the J.

In illuminated manuscripts, Medieval Europe can seem more like Monty Python and the Holy Grail than the grim tales of grey-faced, mildewed kings, monks, knights, and peasants turned out by the Hollywood dozen.

Funny medieval manuscripts