We’ve all been there: after a long day at
work, you sit down and binge-read some Arthurian
romances.
They’re called “illuminated manuscripts”
- because they’re illuminated with illustrations
in the
borders,
colorful drawings,
and very … special doodles in the margins.
But among all those steroidal rabbits
and this hooded person laying literal eggs,
there’s actually a theme...
A lot of medieval knights in these manuscripts
are...fighting snails.
Why is this happening?
The largest snail alive is 15.5 inches, snout
to tail.
So why does this knight look like he’s in
for the fight of his life?
Illuminated manuscripts were handwritten.
Scribes painstakingly transcribed the same
bibles, devotionals, and stories.
They also decorated the margins.
By the 1960s, one scholar thought those margins
were worth attention.
Lillian Randall
was particularly intrigued by “The Snail
in Gothic Marginal Warfare.”
She developed a theory about why a book like
this might include a winged knight fleeing
snails.
And why it showed up again and again and again.
Randall found more than 70 snail-fighting
heroes in just 29 manuscripts,
most of which were made between 1290 and 1310.
Pray for yourself, knight.
Pray that the snail will kill you quickly.
Sometimes the margins riffed on the text,
sometimes they were disconnected.
But Randall connected them to historical stereotypes.
The biggest was that the “Lombards” were
greedy, mean, and cowardly.
The Lombards were a Germanic people that had
invaded Italy.
They were warriors.
But in 772, they were
badly beaten by Charlemagne.
That permanently stained their reputation.
By the late 1200s — when those snail pictures
started getting popular — the Lombards had
become lenders and pawnbrokers spread throughout
Europe.
They didn’t have full rights, they couldn’t
even own arms.
But they did have power.
That combination of power and impotence, Randall
argued, made them targets.
“Snail” was the appropriate insult.
Snails carried their houses on their backs
as they retreated, just as the Lombards had
from Charlemagne.
They were slimy, like a lot of Europeans probably
saw their lenders.
Calling Lombards snails was an anti-foreign
slur
that later grew into a bigger trope.
It appeared in what was probably a medieval
pattern book, with models that helped other
scribes draw.
And snails showed up in many different combinations
later on.
Here’s a snail/monkey/rabbit battle royale
from the 1400s.
Snails were slow.
But they spread.
We can’t be certain what the knights and
snails meant because they meant different
things as the image became a cliche.
The same way people don’t explain their
memes today, scribes didn’t annotate their
games in the margins.
Randall’s argument fits with the timing
and history.
But people also speculate that snails represented
the slowness of time, or the insulation of
the ruling class.
We can only be certain about one thing.
The snails reveal something, along with everything
else in the margins.
As scribes labored over transcriptions of
hallowed works, reproducing every line,
they snuck in additions, jokes, and riffs,
in the margins of the text.
The drawings were fantasies.
But they were made by artists who sought to
parody the indignities and absurdities of
their own world.
The margins were the only space left.
So they turned them into a self-portrait.
Except for this guy.
He’s just going to get murdered by a snail.
So this video just scratches the surface when
it comes to weird medieval art and possible
interpretations.
Michael Camille wrote a whole book about art
in the margins and he highlights one figure:
it’s the gryllus, and he’s supposed to
represent bodily appetites.
It’s very cute and a little disgusting.
