Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art

 

In Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art, Michael Camille, former professor of Art History at the University of Chicago, describes and analyzes the artwork on the borders of Medieval manuscripts, stained glass windows, architecture and court decorations. His examples include both realistic and fantastic creatures, and many are incredibly pornographic images, which seem even more bizarre since they are framing themes from the Bible and religious ceremonies.

I knew nothing about the subject, but I read this book for a week-long Art History course I’m going to take. This is also my choice for the Culture category of the 2024 Nonfiction Reader Challenge.

Each chapter focuses on Art in the Margins of:

• Chapter 1: Illuminated Manuscripts
• Chapter 2: Monasteries
• Chapter 3: Cathedrals
• Chapter 4: The Court
• Chapter 5: The City

And Chapter 6 is “The End of the Edge,” detailing “the beginning of the demise of the tradition of Gothic marginal representation.”

I must confess that I had to often use a dictionary, since there were many terms I didn’t know. These were mostly related to the subject matter (e.g., heteroclite, liminality, sciapod, adynaton, babewyn, etc.). But Camille makes the subject matter both understandable and interesting to the non-specialist. An example of how he relates aspects of Medieval structures to today’s, he writes of cathedrals:

“As the biggest edifices in existence, these vast Mass-machines were not unlike the shimmering Postmodern towers of today’s corporate headquarters; their advanced architectural and technical complexity was symbolic not only of the wealth within but also of the power to exclude those without.”

I also had to use a magnifying glass for many of the illustrations because I had trouble “seeing” some of the images that Camille describes – either they were too small or not detailed enough, or the illustrations were not reproduced very well.

But what I saw with and without the magnifying glass truly surprised me. I never realized Medieval art, sculpture and architecture were so bawdy and perverse. For example, there are many examples of images defecating. Of these, Camille writes:

“Of all aspects of medieval culture it is perhaps the currency of scatology, the constant playing with faeces in text and image, that is hardest for us to understand today. The margins of manuscripts are literally full of it.”

“But it is the metaphor of ‘reading’ in images rather than in books that is most striking, since it suggests investing marginal imagery with the time and space of meaning,” he writes. “To understand the power of this metaphor we have to realize what reading meant in the life of the monk. Reading meant speaking words aloud.”

This gave me a different perspective on the concept of reading these amazing illustrated manuscripts. Referring to what ‘reading meant to a monk,’ he explains the symbolism of the mouth:

“The monk was meant to feed not on the flesh of animals but on the Word of God in a muscular mastication – a rumination, so-called, that released the full flavour or meaning of the text.”

Camille also reminds the reader that “the audience for these images of entertainments is important in assessing the latter’s meaning.” This, of course, is true of all texts, both written and visual.

As the audience of this book, I gained a fuller understanding of the meaning and purposes of these marginal images in various aspects of Medieval art and architecture. I will now have a greater appreciation of these images in future viewing of art, both in museums and in Medieval architecture.