GMAT Practice Test 15

Images in the Margins

¹In many illuminated manuscripts produced in northern Europe between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, the margins surrounding devotional and legal texts are crowded with incongruous images: monkeys imitating clerics, knights fleeing from snails, hybrid creatures playing musical instruments. For a long time art historians treated such images as decorative whimsy, the idle inventions of illuminators relieving the tedium of their work, and regarded them as unrelated to the texts they surrounded. Because the images seemed to have no bearing on the meaning of the page, they were seldom described in the catalogs devoted to the manuscripts.

²More recent scholarship has argued that marginal images frequently engage with the adjacent text, sometimes illustrating a word or phrase literally, sometimes mocking pretension, and sometimes offering a comic counterpoint that a medieval reader would have recognized and enjoyed. This reinterpretation has been valuable in restoring the margins to serious study, but its most ambitious proponents risk replacing one oversimplification with another. To insist that every hybrid creature encodes a learned commentary on the text is to underestimate the variety of purposes the images served. Some were likely requested by the patrons who commissioned the books, reflecting private jokes or family emblems; others recur so often across unrelated manuscripts that they seem to have functioned as stock motifs, copied from model books with little regard for the page on which they appeared. The margins reward close reading, but not every image in them was meant to be read.