Drollery, the strange and fanciful marginal illustrations found in illuminated manuscripts, is the topic of our latest podcast. Fighting rabbits? Check. Hybrid creatures? Check. Faces coming out of, um, unexpected places? Check.
Walters Art Museum, Ms. W.427, fol. 68r
via Discarding Images
The word droll comes from the French drôle, meaning something humorous or funny. Drolleries were common appearances in margins from the mid-13th to 15th century; but although we have many examples of drolleries, we don’t always know what they were supposed to express to readers. Just what was the joke?
These clever images are not unlike today’s memes. Memes are jokes that are easy to understand now, but will make very little sense in a few centuries. (A meme encyclopedia may be in order?)
So, we decided to caption drolleries as though they were memes, with a bit of inspiration from the party game What Do You Meme and Classical Art Memes.
The British Library Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts, Sloane 2435, f. 44v (Found in Keith Houston’s The Book.)
Other images we used in our game are:
The British Library Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts, Sloane 2435, f. 44v
Walters Art Museum, W.239, fol. 85v
John Rylands Library Special Collections, Hebrew MS 6, f. 29b
You can listen to our discussion by following the link. And let us know your favorite droll images and, of course, your meme-like captions.
BnF, Latin 8878, fol. 184v
via Discarding Images
To read more about drollery and illuminated manuscripts, see:
Smithfield Decretals (Decretals of Gregory IX, ca. 1340)
Sexy Codicology, ‘the Adventures of Medival Bunny, Part I: The Killer Rabbit’
Smithsonian ‘Why Were Medival Knights Always Fighting Snails?’
John Rylands Library Special Collection Blog, ‘Life on the Edge: Marginalia’
Bonus:
‘Real Balloon Animals’
Biblio Banter 