Images on the Beatus Page of some Medieval Psalters

* Preparation of this article was assisted by a grant from the graduate school of Boston University.

Abstract

Attempts to find significance in the images that fill the margins of Gothic manuscripts are usually frustrated by the unrestrained mingling of grotesques and more realistic images, neither related to the page on which they occur. We have tended to assume, therefore, that however magnificent and serious the decoration of a manuscript page, its margins were a sort of spatial mardi gras where anything was allowed, even the secular products of playful illuminators. Seduced by the worldliness of marginal drolleries and grotesques, we have often forgotten that it is just the familiar, the common, and the worldly which are likely to be seized on for allegorical expression of spiritual truths.