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!” “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. “Both tell us huge amounts about a book’s history and the people who have contributed to it, from creation to the present day.” “And marginalia provide layers of information as to the various human hands that have shaped their form and content.” From intriguingly detailed illustrations to random doodles, the drawings and other marks made along the edges of pages in medieval manuscripts-called marginalia-are not just peripheral matters. Manuscripts can be seen as time capsules,” says Johanna Green, Lecturer in Book History and Digital Humanities at the University of Glasgow.
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