Elevated Art in Margins and Borders
Luxury manuscripts were an industry unto themselves in the later Middle Ages: rather than written exclusively by monks in the dim light of a monastery’s scriptorium, workshops of scribes and artists working in tandem to produce books that were as beautiful as they were informative and useful, and aimed to sell their products to a growing wealthy elite and middle class. These manuscripts were made with real gold, with crushed gems and metals to add splashes of vibrant color, and an excruciating attention to detail. Luxury manuscripts occupied a space of both function and conspicuous consumption, objects that an owner could use to flaunt their wealth the way someone today might drive a flashy car or dress in designer clothes. In this space, marginalia flourished as a form of fine art that elevated a manuscript beyond the mundane, while artistic borders created a firm boundary between text and “everything else.”
The gold illuminations and precise, perfect handwriting of luxury manuscripts often dissuaded the casual notes or idle scribblings of a bored and curious reader, but luxury books were nevertheless often surprisingly intimate in how they reflected the identity of the person who commissioned the work for their private ownership. These manuscripts were often customized and personalized to the manuscript’s future owner’s tastes, incorporating specific prayers selected by the owner. Marginal art, too, was often tailored to the owner’s preference, often incorporating an owner’s family coat of arms, and a future owner might go so far as to literally scrape away the paint of the original crest to replace it with theirs, erasing one reader’s identity to make way for their own.
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On Illustrious Men of the City of Rome, attributed to Pliny the Elder. Italy, 15th Century.
Books of Hours may have been the most plentiful luxury manuscripts of the Middle Ages, but that didn’t mean that non-religious texts escaped the eye of patrons looking to flaunt their wealth or to enjoy a more lavish book.
This manuscript brings together a collection of biographies by a handful of authors, including the page here that purports to be “De viris illustribus urbis Romae” (On Illustrious Men of the City of Rome). The opening line attributes authorship to Pliny the Elder, though today consensus agrees that the author remains uncertain.
In some ways the illuminated initial, an oversized “P” in “Proca Albanorum rex” (Proca, king of the Albans) plays between text and marginalia: it’s part of the core text, but in its extravagance it spills out into the margins, consuming nearly two-thirds of the page with its length. This tail is called the “stem” of the initial, and the scattered vines and flowers that fan out around it are called a “spray.” The top end of the spray has been cut off, suggesting that a later owner removed the original cover and trimmed the pages to be even before rebinding it into a new, smaller cover.
De viris illustribus urbis Romae [On Illustrious Men of the City of Rome], attributed to Pliny the Elder (author unknown). Italy, 1400-1500. Call Number: MS D13.
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Books of Hours: Borders between Margins and Text
Books of Hours were some of the most popular decorated and illuminated manuscripts of the later Middle Ages. Their purpose is in their name: these were books that contain the different prayers meant to be read privately at different hours of the day. This differed from other medieval liturgical texts that were meant to be read aloud in a public setting.
Because Books of Hours were used for private devotion, they also often became expressions of personal wealth, opulent in the visual information they conveyed alongside their text. Their handwritten scripts are typically painstakingly neat, a Gothic textura script meant to demonstrate a visual opulence because it took longer to write than more informal handwriting styles. And they frequently featured illumination, the process of adding real gold to the page in thin leaf, to make the page literally gleam. Margins made no escape from the visual extravagance in Books of Hours, and they were often packed with ornate borders that visually frame the text. These borders created a strong boundary between the text and the free blank space where a reader’s imagination could thrive.
As a result of their beauty, however, Books of Hours are frequent victims of dismemberment and book breaking, the practice of taking apart a book page by page to sell the most beautiful leaves for a greater profit while often throwing away the more mundane or less aesthetically pleasing leaves without illustration or illumination. These three leaves were all taken from such books, and in the process, we've lost the ability to understand their artwork in the larger context of the whole book.
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Leaf from a book of hours containing a miniature of the Crucifixion
This leaf demonstrates the degree to which illuminated manuscripts could become a visual medium as much as a written one. The words take up little more than a tiny square within the page and make up only two sentences: “Domine labia mea aperies. Et os meum annu[n]ciabit laude[m] tua[m]” (Lord, open my lips. And my mouth shall announce your praise). Meanwhile, the miniature (an illustration, from the term miniare, meaning to color something with red ink) depicts the Crucifixion of Jesus here marks the beginning of the Hours of the Virgin Mary. The Virgin Mary’s popularity soared in the later Middle Ages, and Books of Hours almost always included prayers dedicated to her, known as the Little Office of the Virgin Mary.
Leaf from a book of hours containing a miniature of the Crucifixion. France, 15th Century. Call number: MS 9:2/5.
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Leaf from a book of hours containing Psalms 44 (45) and 45 (46)
This particular leaf is from a more modest example of a Book of Hours: the marginalia is fairly simplistic in execution, and somewhat less carefully applied than the more luxurious examples, with the colored ink often running outside the borders. The gold was applied with a technique using powdered goal mixed with gum, rather than thin gold leaf, a technique more popular in the fifteenth century. his style of floral border of thin vines and flowers, called rinceaux, was particularly popular in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The text contained in this leaf belongs to Psalm 45 of the Latin Bible, beginning “Deus noster refugium et virtus” (God is our refuge and strength).
Leaf from a book of hours containing Psalms 44 (45) and 45 (46). France, 15th Century.
Call number: MS 9:2/4.
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Leaf from a book of hours
Animals, and especially birds, featured popularly in Books of Hours’ marginal and border art. Marginalia in luxury productions like these was often outsourced to professional artists’ workshops who would complete any initial letters, margins and illustrations after the text had been written. These artists would sometimes take inspiration from local wildlife in in depicting the animals that made their way into the margins.
This particular leaf actually contains the same text as MS 9:2/5: the largest illuminated letter opens the line, “Domine labia mea apres.” The elaborate “D” of “Domine labia mea apres,” is also what is commonly called an “inhabited initial” – within its white border is a small, golden two-legged monster circled by leaves, a conjuring of the artist’s imagination, unlike the more realistic bird in the margins.
Leaf from a book of hours. France, 15th Century. Call number: MS 9:2/3.
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Printed Book of Hours. Paris, France, 1502.
The printing press imitated medieval manuscripts by recreating handwriting scripts as printed fonts and recreating the ordered structure of commentary surrounding the core text. But that imitation also extended into reproducing the ornate borders and margins of the most luxurious manuscripts of the Middle Ages.
This early printed work is a “Book of Hours,” a genre of prayer books intended for private prayer and devotion that blossomed in popularity among the general population in the later Middle Ages. Many owners would pay to have their manuscript Book of Hours customized into beautiful works of art with illuminated illustrations and ornate designs in their borders and margins. This practice persisted with the advent of print, but rather than personalized designs, the art was mass produced. Rather than hand-painted as in medieval manuscripts, however, the artwork was created using woodcuts, wherein a carved relief of the design was coated with ink and then pressed into the page to create reproducible illustrations. An owner might then pay to have these illustrations hand-colored, but many were left in black and white.
In this particular Book of Hours, the borders borrow motifs from medieval illustration: the margins are “inhabited,” meaning they include human and animal figures inside them, depicting scenes from daily life alongside stranger concoctions such as monsters and grotesques.
Vostre, Simon. Ces presentes heures a lusaige de Rōme …faictes pour Symō vostre. [“The Current Hours in the Usage of Rome… Made for Simon Vostre”]. Paris: P. Pigouchet, 1502. Call Number: Summerfield B491.