Other Andrew Otwell Art History papers

Medieval Manuscript Marginalia and Proverbs

© Andrew Otwell, 1995

This paper has two aims. The first is to attempt to trace the development of ideas about medieval marginal manuscript images. At the outset, I will note that the bulk of this takes the form of looking at the work of two authors, Lillian Randall and Michael Camille. These two authors, though their acceptance in their own periods differs greatly, have effected the greatest changes in the perception of the marginal. Few other scholars have published more than once on these images, both Randall and Camille have produced a number of provocative works. Of course, the work of other scholars is quite important to theirs, especially in the case of Camille, and will be considered.

The second purpose of this paper is to attempt to synthesize a disparate set of theories about marginal images into a useful hypothesis. I am not inclined to engage in an iconographic debate with these authors over individual images or manuscripts. However, I hope to extract the most useful aspects of several of them in order to try to explain not individual sources, but the relationship of the reader, text, and marginal image in what I will eventually characterize as a "proverbial relationship". Therefore, much of my historiography in the first section will concentrate on the aspects of Randall, Camille, and others that I find useful for my own ideas.

A Historiography of Marginal Images

Early work on marginalia, as Randall and Camille point out, consists of little more than an acknowledgement of its existence. Conclusions about the images are uniformly disparaging and dismissive. Randall reminds her readers that the bulk of such studies includes phrases such as "allusions to 'burlesque drawings' and 'grotesque fancies'."[1] Camille notes briefly the comments of the British Museum's Keeper of Manuscripts in 1898, who had written that marginal illustrations were purely ornamental and unconnected with the body of the manuscript. This author wrote:

The ornamentation of a book must have been regarded as a work having no connection whatever with the character of the book itself. Its details amused or aroused the viewer, who in his amusement or admiration took no thought of whether the text was sacred or profane.[2]

Camille correctly sees a "fear of the proliferation of perversities" and avoidance of an engagement with the images in such statements.[3] Of some "fancy grotesques" M.R. James had written tersely in 1913 that "it is no part of my plan to notice [them.]"[4] Randall, too, felt that earlier scholars had avoided discussion of marginal illustrations primarily out of concern for decorum or vulgarity.[5] One could even read such concern into Bernard of Clairvaux' statement of 1135, in which he wrote in part "What are these lascivious apes doing . . . what is the meaning of fighting soldiers and horn-blowing hunters?"[6] Bernard's question was echoed several hundred years later by Emile Mâle, who asked of the gargoyles of Reims: "What do they signify - the prodigious heads that emerge from the facade . . . ?"[7] Mâle would answer that they signified little more than simple imaginative fantasies.

Such attitudes survived with little development until quite recently. H.W. Janson wrote that marginalia was purely free play of the illustrator, and was essentially meaningless. Though he limited his 1952 study of marginalia to images of apes, Janson felt confident that any attempt to find meaning in them would be "fruitless, since drôleries, with rare exceptions, have no illustrative function."[8] Betraying some of the earlier scholars' prudishness, Janson went to some lengths to clarify his position:

the spirit of the drôleries has few parallels in literature. Only the 'nonsense tales' scattered here and there through medieval poetry at times approach the unhampered flow of subjective fancy . . . .[9]

Ultimately, Janson's disapproval of marginalia leads him to want to return it to the bestiaries he believes it came from. Since marginal images are meaningless, they are worth only the trouble of being classified into a few visual categories, as he does with ape imagery. He does this rather well for the images he chooses, and no doubt his work on one section of the body of marginal illustrations inspired Lillian Randall's efforts. Janson also displays another characteristic of early scholarship of the margins, the tendency to think that marginalia somehow reflected "the entire range of medieval experience" and life, and that it was a kind of genre art which can be considered a sort of social history.[10] This assumption was not wholly disputed until quite recently.

Lillian Randall has been the most consistent scholar of marginal illustrations. Over the course of several articles in the 1960's and 1970's, she single-handedly brought the images to a new level of scholarly consideration; her work certainly is the foundation upon which all subsequent writers are based. However, this does not mean that Randall produced a satisfactory theory to account for the existence of marginalia. The value of her work lies in her fairly strict iconographic methods, and she tends to avoid stepping back from small details.

Randall's first published article on exempla as a source for marginal art, published in 1957, seems to me to be one of the most enduring of her writings. This article appears to be one of the first in which real meaning and function was attached to marginalia, as opposed to considering them mere entertainment or fancy.[11] She points out that marginal illustrations became more frequent in manuscripts of the first half of the 13th century at a time when changes occurred in the style and content of popular preaching. Randall describes the increased use of exempla in sermons as devices to promote interest and keep the attention of listeners.[12] Sermons by both Franciscans and Dominicans were embellished with humorous anecdotes and quotations from literary traditions, soon added were fables and sections of bestiaries. This type of addition to the sermon became codified fairly quickly in handbooks of exempla that began to be published in the second half of the 13th century.[13] Randall finds that in general, between one and five exempla were appended to the beginnings and ends of sermons to act as moralizing elements.[14] Randall suggests that it might be possible to discover specific sources for many marginal images in these exempla.[15] She writes: "It is evident that by the middle of the 13th century, the majority of the meaningful themes current in Gothic marginal illumination had already been excerpted from the sources [as exempla]."[16] This connection may be lost to us, though she suspects that it was quite apparent to the medieval reader.[17] As I shall argue, Randall's suggestion of the analogous function and relationship to the text of marginal illustrations to proverbs can be taken further.

Unfortunately, Randall's beliefs about the value of marginalia restrict her from expanding on this provocative idea. She believes, for example, that both exempla and marginalia was intended primarily to amuse, and in doing so to lead the listener's or reader's attention to the meaningful text.[18] She spends much of the remainder of the article establishing what some of the possible sources could be. Randall was clearly aided in her new conception of marginal art by an article in 1954 by A.C. Friend, who noted the importance of the use of proverbs by the English William of Serlo in teaching Latin and in the opening and closing of a composition. Serlo's proverbs were among the first to be compiled into catalogs in about 1150-1170, and directly influenced French proverbial compendiums of about 20 years later.[19]

In several articles before and after the publication of her book in 1966, Randall traced specific proverbial sources for marginal illustrations. In an article of 1960, Randall showed how proverbs became useful not just in preaching, but in other areas such as introductory passages in romance texts or as general illustrative examples in social speech.[20] Proverbial compendiums like Serlo's circulated through schools where they were continually added to.[21] She continues to presume that "most unknown ambiguous scenes" on misericords and in manuscript margins were related to proverbs, but frustratingly, she concludes that they are difficult to distinguish from the "scenes of daily life, customs, or humorous ridicule."[22] She continues to be concerned solely with the provable iconographic sources for marginalia rather than their overall function or mode of depicting. Her conclusions are useful; she traces several marginal images of eggs back to a Franco-Flemish proverb current in the last two decades of the thirteenth century, and convincingly argues, for example, their partial function as subtly anti-English.[23]

Similarly in 1962 Randall showed the possible humorous and satirical implications of the image of the knight battling the snail and tied those implications to beliefs about Lombards and peasant cowardice.[24] Even in 1972, Randall continued to search for direct proverbial sources for the bas-de-page images in the Hours of Jeanne D'Evreaux. In that article, she continued to consider these images in some sense a "visual documentary source" of contemporary life.[25] In an attempt to dispute the usual interpretation of them as merely humorous, she describes images of buffeting and tilting games as contemporary genre scenes, and compellingly relates them to adjacent images of the mocking of Christ and Annunciation.[26]

Randall's major work is her In the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts of 1966. As an index of marginal images, this work has been uniformly praised and cited in every subsequent study of the images. Her brief introductory essay presents most of her ideas about marginalia to that point. However, it is somewhat diluted in an effort to produce a general theory about the images. It is worth considering here the aspects of her work which continue to be influential and which I hope to build upon.

A preoccupation with the tension between sacred and profane exists in Randall's book, and creeps into this work more than in her articles. What seems to me valuable about avoiding this distinction, as she had previously, is that it does not limit the modes of interpretation that the scholar may assume of the medieval reader. To state that an image is sacred or profane, even if it is ambiguously so, locates it artificially in a spectrum of understanding which the modern scholar has little access to.

Randall concludes, for example, that romances, as "secular" texts did not get as much marginal treatment since "religious" texts needed to offer more diversion during dull services.[27] In religious texts, marginal illustrations, like exempla, exist to encourage the reader's attention on the text at hand, whereas in a presumably more entertaining secular romance, the viewer's attention would not need such prodding. She further explains this apparent functional reason for differences in illustration by saying that in religious works, the "medieval propensity for the juxtaposition of contrasting elements" was more clearly felt, since the subject matter more often lent itself to depictions of moral extremes.[28] Again, a division of the secular and religious here leads Randall to conclusions which prevent her from reconsidering the function of marginalia as a whole.

Randall restates her argument that many marginal images can be traced back to specific proverbs, exempla, or fabliaux, a tradition of often mocking moralizing stories drawn from burlesques, pieces of epics, or what Randall calls "observations of daily life."[29] She states that these sources were secular, yet worthy of respect because of their moral tone.[30] The basis in proverbial speech and thought was so clear, that even criticism of them resorted to it, as by the Cistercian Adam of Doré:

Is the panorama of the Old and New Testaments so meager that we must needs set aside what is comely and profitable, and, as the saying goes, make ducks and drakes of our money in favor of ignoble fancies?[31]

Randall's inclination is to categorize the material ceaselessly into groups from religious sources, secular literature, scenes of daily life, or parodies.[32] She assumes that continued investigation would provide sources for even the most obscure allusions found in the scenes of daily life which would relate them to the text, despite their primary role as diversions. Parodies of human action by animals or hybrids are the largest broad category of marginal images, she writes. Ultimately, though, any representation of parodies

was less overly didactic than in analogous subjects preserved in fabliaux and exempla. An element of humor was seldom absent, in the rendering if not the theme, and the aim was to divert and elevate.[33]

S.K. Davenport responded to Randall's work in the early 1970's. He criticizes the prevailing assumption that views marginalia in religious texts as seemingly "profane and grotesque . . . [since it] eliminates from the outset any direct relation to the text."[34] In fact, Davenport attempts to tie marginal illustrations of an Alexander romance quite closely to the text. He states: "Illustration . . . always involves a certain amount of elaboration, or amplification of the narratives - the addition of details unspecified or unmentioned in the text."[35] He finds, for example, that a marginal illustration of musicians relates to an adjacent text about noise and mortality, and images of games play off a struggle described in the text.[36]

This is a significant development, for Randall had not assumed such a direct relationship between text and margin, but rather one between an external source and margin not necessarily derived from the text. She does briefly allow in her book that there might be some connection between image and text, most likely on pages which mark the divisions of the text. However, she does not follow up on this hypothesis.

Opening the Discourse

I must now move ahead a number of years. The most significant scholar of marginalia in recent times is unquestionably Michael Camille.[37] Though his book, Image on the Edge, is not the definitive statement on marginal art, and has been criticized harshly, his work marks a profound change from traditional scholarship. Of course, Camille did not appear out of nowhere. In fact, much of what Camille says in Image on the Edge can be traced to other recent work. His own earlier writing is, I think, more rigorous and often exceptionally provocative. I should add by way of explanation that I have limited myself to a discussion of authors that have worked specifically on marginal images, which reduces the field of discussion dramatically. Certainly much recent scholarship, such as Camille's, is informed by a broad base of ideas which draw from many disciplines which have contributed to the idea of the "marginal" in medieval art.

A response to Randall's categorization of images seems to have concerned Karl Wentersdorf in 1984. Directly opposed to the "traditional" interpretation of margins as meaningless or entertaining, he examines one category of Randall's images: the figurae obscœnae. Historians such as Janson have believed that many such images likely fall into the category of parody and satire of the actions of corrupt priests, and thus act as moralizing reminders.[38] Wentersdorf is suspicious of an interpretation which sees corrupt priests as the intended subject of these images, stating that it is unlikely that the people who commissioned these manuscripts, which are often liturgical documents as well as private books of hours, wanted to be satirized in such a way.[39] Additionally, it is difficult for him to accept that these figures had a primarily comedic function since they appeared in such important documents.[40] Wentersdorf is able, then, to avoid the facile separation of secular and sacred by considering the function of the manuscripts, and to search for the first time for potentially religious meanings in these liturgical objects directly related to the meanings of the texts.

Wentersdorf traces the sources of "excremental imagery" to classical authors, and argues that such imagery had been developed by Christianity as a potent force. Marginal images can visually harness "the power inherent in excrement" and man's ability to direct it against Satan.[41] I believe that Camille comes to a not dissimilar conclusion about the final illustration in Image on the Edge. From the Voeux du Paon in the Pierpont Morgan Library, it depicts a monkey who excretes into the mouth of a demon whose tail ends in a man blowing a trumpet.

Briefly, Wentersdorf contributes to the opening of the discourse by engaging for the first time images which previously had been avoided, even by Randall. In doing so, he begins to break down the false barrier between secular and sacred. He also contributes to a reconsideration of the way that marginal images carry meaning by suggesting that they operate differently from the text, but can reinforce or inflect the meaning of it to the reader.

In two articles in 1985 and 1987, Camille contributed much to a reconsideration of marginalia. In fact, I consider the earlier of these two, "The Book of Signs: Writing and Visual Difference in Gothic Manuscript Illumination," to be exceptionally helpful in considering a theory of marginal images. He begins to consider the physical location of the margin as space removed from the text, and is able to therefore define the relationship of the marginal illustration to other elements of manuscripts. He writes of a sexual marginal illustration in a Roman de la Rose, "Just as writing is marginal to speech and illustration in relation to writing, here we see an image marginalized, literally in relation to other illustrations."[42] At this point he retains some of the traditional view of the diverting function of marginalia when he states that the images were "unfolding in the extra-textual realm where both artist and reader sought evocative escape from the wearisome codification of the logos and its illustration."[43] Interestingly, it is in a realm of "exempla, satire, and social observation" that this escape takes place.[44] This statement expands upon Randall's conclusions about exempla, characterizing the relationship between reader and marginal image as meaningful rather than simply noting its existence.

Camille combines insights with frustrating assumptions. He suggests that, "just as jokes and nonsense poems can be seen as meta-cultural or meta-semiotic messages . . ." marginal images too can operate outside normal speech or visual structure. In the same sentence, though, Camille concludes that "Gothic marginalia are an unexplored and yet fruitful repository of meanings, attitudes, and signs of the medieval unconscious."[45]

Camille's 1987 article "Laboring for the Lord: The Ploughman and Social Order in the Luttrell Psalter," anticipates his more theoretical attempts to describe marginal images in Image on the Edge. He begins by questioning the assumption made for decades that marginalia was a useful resource for images of daily life in the medieval period. He cites one scholar in 1965 as saying the images "display a lively realism" and are useful for "understanding conditions of medieval living."[46] Camille then proceeds to investigate the image of the ploughman in the Luttrell Psalter. He traces the Biblical origins of the image through its relatively stable meaning in early fourteenth-century England as a symbol of the good Christian, sustenance, and fertility.[47] The image of the ploughman became an exempla used by preachers, just as Randall showed occurred in France, eventually appearing as the Piers Ploughman as a symbol of the Christian community.[48]

The historical development, however, of plowing technology and the image of the ploughman did not correspond. As the ploughman appears in the margins, Camille states, he is a constructed symbol for the upper class reader, which represents a traditional, not contemporary, type of plowing.[49] The symbol of Christian fertility becomes an image of "communal service" unrelated to fact. [50] While the details of Camille's argument are not germane here, it is important to note that he concludes that "What we might first see as a realistic detail observed by the artist can be the visualization of the proverbial experience . . . ."[51] Considering marginal images the "visualization of the proverbial experience" allows Camille to investigate not only the image and its sources, but the role of the viewer and his or her relationship to the manuscript.

Camille's 1992 book, Image on the Edge is far too complex to attempt to summarize in a few paragraphs. Again, it will be most useful to draw from this work the aspects of it that I believe are useful in synthesizing a view of marginalia. Image on the Edge does not only attempt to reconsider marginal imagery, but is an attempt at at new kind of art history of medieval art from a postmodernist perspective. It seems to be an early response perhaps to Lee Patterson's 1990 "On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies." Patterson sees medievalism as an already "marginalized" discipline in its slow acceptance of new ideas, and calls for medievalist to accept Postmodernism, a view which "claims to privilege the marginal."[52]

Camille does not outline a single overall view of marginal art, but approaches the images from many perspectives. He does state that the appearance of the use of the margin, be it on the edge of the manuscript page or on a remote part of a cathedral, is indicative of a change in the comprehension of images and words in the medieval period. The manuscript margin, for example, is part of a shift "from speaking words to seeing words" in the apprehension of texts. Marginal illustrations, for Camille, become part of a "scanned system of visual units" on a page.[53] This positioning of the images is critical for Camille's belief about marginal art as a whole: that the margins arose to insure that the words of the center "be fixed . . . and their shaky status be counterposed with something even less stable, more base and, in semiotic terms, even more illusory . . . ."[54]

Camille deals with the marginal images as acting as kinds of exempla, but seems to weaken his statement of 1987, in which he had called them "visualization of the proverbial experience." He notes proverbs "are not really 'texts.' Because of their oral matrix as 'sayings,' they suggest speech without a speaker, an utterance of universal application . . . ." Both proverbs and marginal images lack "the iconographic stability of a religious narrative or icon."[55] I will argue that this is precisely the value of marginal images, and in part an explanation of their relationship to both text and reader. Camille, however, does not further consider proverbs in this book. Rather, he returns to the thesis that "marginal art is about the anxiety of nomination and the problem of signifying nothing in order to give birth to meaning at the centre."[56]

Rather than recount all of Camille's arguments, I turn now to two articles that appeared simultaneously in 1992 and which consider marginal imagery in similarly provocative ways. Both Nurith Kenaan-Kedar and Sylvia Huot seem to have been influenced by Camille's work in the late 1980's, and reflect a more strictly academic view of marginalia.

Kenaan-Kedar discusses as "marginal" Romanesque corbels such as those at St. Pierre at Aulnay-de-Saintonge which she sees as diverging from official Church art. These images of grotesque heads and faces are a marginal "anti-model" to the accepted sculptural programs. Though the Church would read them as allegorical representations of sin and vice, the laity could view them as real depictions of marginalized elements of society, the drunkards, fools, and jongleurs.[57] Keenan-Kedar states that "parodic literature" offers close parallels to this kind of two-level reading of the images. In popular tales such as Audiger or Turbert "grotesque figures of knights, peasants, and marginals abound, and the language is coarse."[58] Such stories were part of a milieu which popularized the humorously grotesque, and may have provided associations for the laity in viewing sculptural elements of a cathedral. She also notes literary sources where two worlds met, as in the "Dialogue of King Solomon and Marcolf." The title characters exchange proverbs in a humorous debate of refinement versus coarse humor, as in this exchange:

Solomon: A good and pretty woman is an ornament to her husband.

Marcolf: A pot full of milk must be guarded from the cat[59]

Camille sees such encounters as models for the juxtaposition of scared and profane in marginal images, reinforcing through proverbial speech the official "center" of morality and propriety.

Sylvia Huot sees some marginal images in manuscripts as kinds of visual mnemonic devices for the readers. Camille in passing suggests such a role for the images, stating that marginalia arose at the same time that reading apprehension shifted from speaking words to seeing words. However, Huot is more historically cautious, limiting herself to images in the margins of romances and some epic poems. Huot states that marginal images in some cases arose from the oral reading of poems as devices to aid in the memorization of long texts. Marginalia gave "visual forms to rhetorical topoi" of the troubadour lyric, solidifying a set of events as a coherent narrative.[60]

Margins could unify texts for the reader. Huot writes of a romance manuscript that an

allegorical text transposes philosophical precepts, psychological states, or spiritual truths into [a written] image, or series of images, that can be visualized and retained by the reader . . . the visual mapping of poetic language [in marginal illustrations] results in the creation of a unified sequence of images that presents an allegorical representation of the love experience.[61]

As depicted images of textual metaphors marginal images are visual metaphors of textual metaphors (meta-metaphors?) which have primarily a memorial function, not an entertaining one.

Huot's work is clearly well-informed by Mary Carruthers' 1990 The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, which is conspicuous by its absence in Camille's book of two years later. Carruthers makes no small contribution in this book to the study of marginal images, though she does not write about them directly. She outlines a medieval conception of learning based on the placement of texts in memory, not just by scholars, but by all readers. She considers the relationship between the visual structure of the page and the method of reading, and the function of images in memory-making. Carruthers notes that numerous medieval authors including Hugh of St. Victor, Thomas Bradwardine, and Albertus Magnus considered images ideal as effective mnemonic devices in learning. As a result of this esteem for their function, images, such as marginalia, could take any form that was considered effective, including what could otherwise be considered inappropriate.[62] Seen in this light, perhaps marginal illustrations previously seen as obscene or as pure diversion should be reconsidered as significant in their function.

A Synthesis of the "Proverbial Relationship"

In this section, I hope to synthesize a conception of marginal illustrations perhaps different from the scholars I have discussed above. My intention is not to propose a method of explaining what are certainly iconographic associations of many images that are lost to us. What I am more interested in is how such images carried meaning for the reader of manuscripts. I must here, then specify some variables: I am considering only marginal images from the early twelfth century through the fifteenth century. Marginal decoration such as that in the Hours of Catherine of Cleves in the fifteenth century is of a wholly different order than marginal illustrations of a century before. It has become a form of trompe -l'oeil which I do not believe can be explained in the same way that, say, the bas-de-page images in the Hours of Jeanne D'Evreaux can. These images are depictions of objects, rather than illustrations.[63]

I would like to characterize the marginal illustration as standing in a "proverbial relationship" to both reader and text. By this I mean that the marginal image carries meaning in a way similar to a proverb, and at an equivalent distance from its iconographic origin and from its recipient.

There is startlingly little work on the nature of the proverb and how it carries meaning.[64] In fact, Randall's work on proverbs and exempla provides the most solid understanding of the use of proverbs in the medieval period. First, consider the proverb and its relationship to language. It is composed of elements of language, and references the world outside of itself, yet is self-contained: it does not depend on other linguistic elements to be complete. Proverbs do not literally change text or speech, but exist alongside it and stand in relation to it. The proverb is necessarily meta-linguistic in that its use is always to comment on, reinterpret, inflect, satirize, make symbolic, or simplify ordinary speech or writing. Consider their function, as Randall has documented, as "glosses" on sermons designed to aid in the understanding of a moral message. They appear as introductions or conclusions, which casts them as meta-textual, and their known or obvious meaning illuminates the sermon.

The proverb, though its origins can perhaps be traced by a diligent scholar, essentially has no "origin" for the user of it. Recall that Camille called the proverb "protean" in this sense, and noted their and marginal images' "lack of iconographic stability."[65] The proverb must derive from a what appears to be an external, universal source or moment in order to have meaning and legitimacy. Camille states that "they suggest speech without a speaker, an utterance of universal application . . . ."[66] This allows the proverb to be flexible in its use, in fact, this "invisible" source is the locus of the proverb's power.

Marginal images operate in nearly identical ways. While I do not contend that every marginal illustration has a direct proverbial basis, I believe that their function and role is analogous to the proverb in speech or writing, the "visualization of the proverbial experience," according to Camille. Marginal images stand physically outside the text, they occupy the same position that the proverb does to speech. Like the proverb, they do not literally change the text, but exist alongside it. Camille notes that they function in this way in relation to a text which was supposedly complete but is revealed by their addition to in fact be incomplete, just as a proverb can codify the meaning of an unclear text or statement.[67] They can behave as a gloss or commentary on the text itself, as Camille notes[68], but it is more helpful to consider them, as Huot does, as kinds of mental aids to apprehension, as pointers or visual triggers. Like proverbs, they are not meaningless, or merely entertaining, but by themselves they do not contain complete meaning. Like the proverb, they are "activated" by their association with a text. A comment by Gombrich seems to apply well to them. Since images, he says, in general lack "such formators as the definite and indefinite articles [they are therefore] unable to signify the distinction between the universal and the particular."[69] Marginal images exist in an middle state between meaning and meaninglessness, and are kept in that state by their placement on a manuscript page where they are visually fixed, but open to interpretation. In fact, like proverbs, they require the reader or speaker to come into being and to be placed in relation to a text or speech. It occurs to me that further investigation of the linguistics and history of proverbial speech might provide more in the way of constructing a "space" in which proverbs and marginalia could occupy in learning and the comprehension of texts.

Marginal illustrations rarely, if ever, have any traceable stylistic origins, which contributes to their indeterminate distance from the manuscript reader. This apparent lack of source also distances the image from other illustrations on the manuscript page. Randall comments on the difference in style between marginal images and central illustrations done by the same hands, a difference she ascribes to the "freedom" allowed the artist in the marginal spaces.[70] I would suggest, however, that any such freedom was mediated by the need for the marginal image to appear generalized and without apparent source.

Roland Barthes has written on how the Text can carry multiple meanings.[71] Perhaps his model can cast my hypothesis in an interesting light. For Barthes, the Text is a work in a relationship to a viewer or reader as it is "conceived, perceived, and received in its integrally symbolic nature"[72] Barthes states, "the Text is not a co-existance of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination."[73] Considering the marginal image as in a proverbial relationship to the reader and to the text implies that it necessarily behaves in this way and cannot have one meaning, but many. "The Text is not to be though of as an object that can be computed," Barthes writes[74], and neither should the "proverbial" marginal image be considered reducible to simply a proverbial source, or a joke, or a piece of the "secular" or the "sacred," but as a thing that must move between these and other meanings.

A very few words in conclusion on patronage, a subject which I find exceptionally hard to discuss in terms of my hypothesis above. Since I believe that marginalia is drawn intentionally from contemporary sources, yet proceeds from a source which must be indistinct in order to have meaning, that the specific selection of images implied by patronage is unlikely. Cases in which marginal images seem to glorify directly the patron of the manuscript can be explained, too, as perhaps tapping into the power of the margins, placing the patron into a powerful "proverbial relationship" with the reader and the manuscript.

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