This long-awaited study of the marginalia in European manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, directed by Jean Wirth, follows on half a century of intense research on images in the margins by many prominent scholars of medieval material culture, much of it inspired by Lilian Randall’s publications in the 1950s and 1960s. In dealing with this perplexing material since the 1980s, interpretive strategies and theoretical frameworks have become as significant as source hunting and social context. Memorization and punning, laughter and fear, have been evoked as reader responses in varied circumstances. Those scholars, such as Michael Camille, whose interrogation of the margins is informed by postmodern theories of verbal and visual communication, easily accepted multivalence over unitary meanings. Viewer reception is psychologically, culturally, and historically contingent. Some of these issues have been elucidated through extensive work on humor and obscenity, but they remain far less accessible to some modern viewers than piety and politics.

Les Marges à drôleries dans les manuscrits gothiques (1250-1350) is a collective enterprise, with Jean Wirth supplying a quarter of the text, interspersed with other contributions (apparently edited by him), as noted below. Throughout the book, Wirth rejects postmodern ways of reading (e.g., 307), returning to more restricted frameworks, and to the traditional term “drôleries” for all the things that happen in the margins (as in English “funny,” drôle hovers between peculiar and amusing, thus disavowing the demonic and freakish). Positivism informs the scope and conclusions of this large tome. Formal and iconographic descriptions and analysis predominate. However, the quantity of material, including many excellent color plates that reproduce leaves or openings at their real size, can enrich our knowledge of marginalia.

In chapter 1, on methodological problems, Wirth constructs a binary opposition among previous interpretations, between no-sense and nonsense: Emile Mâle purportedly allowed no textual relevance to marginalia, while the Chaucerian scholar D. W. Robertson insisted on finding hypothetical textual associations (18). Wirth sets up several other straw women and men, such as Randall and Camille, in order to enunciate three rules that derive from the mistakes of the past: first, “don’t hypothesize that a specific allusion is intended unless it is visibly manifest” (19); second, “the likelihood that a motif alludes to a specific iconographic subject or text is in inverse proportion to the frequency with which it occurs” (21); and third, “the meaning of a motif cannot be established without examining its various manifestations” (25). The evident goal will be to avoid “incorrect” interpretations (or at least to arrive at “satisfactory” ones (39)), but with a nod toward multivalence; for instance, the example illustrating the third rule allows intervisuality, and admits that the same visual sign can have multiple referents that depend on the viewing context. I do not want to get into picayune disputes with Wirth, but he is mistaken in supposing that a horse’s jaw was never used to bow a musical instrument, since Andean folk musicians still use it, and the object and its custom must have come with the beast from Europe (37). Statistics from the eighty or so manuscripts examined are given great importance (e.g., on page 17, readers are told that scatological subjects, as defined by Wirth, are represented in only one to two percent of drolleries; and that twenty percent of hunting scenes are parodies [Adriana Fisch Hartley, 196]). Wirth, especially, bolsters his interpretations with statistics in a way that tends to overdetermine his argument. In his contributions to the volume, he tends to be aggressive in dismissing the scholarship of others, yet anxious not to make mistakes himself; his attitude resonates with rabbits in the margins that are armed with swords.

In chapter 2, Andreas Bräm contributes an outline of the compositional principles governing marginalia, and the formal development of overall page design, as practiced in French, Flemish, and English workshops in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The connections drawn between different manifestations of something we modernists have come to know as marginal decoration present a grand narrative, but it is nowhere knit together into a thick history, by specific stories of transmission—such as the migration of the Peterborough Psalter across the Channel to Paris—nor associated with an immediate intellectual context, such as the interest among English and continental theologians in Aristotle’s goat-stag at just the time hybrids took over the edges of the page. Transmission is generally attributed to anonymous traveling painters. Such developmental narratives extol the precocious and inventive—including magisterial innovation—and delegitimize the conventional and “retardetaire.”

Chapter 3, by Wirth with contributions by Isabelle Engammare, Céline Fressart, and Herman Braet, traces iconographic genres and motifs that originated in earlier art, notably in Romanesque sculpture as proposed by Jurgis Baltrušaitis in 1960, differentiating the new themes invented in Gothic. That point of departure leaves out Anglo-Saxon psalters and the Bayeux Embroidery. The authors settle for the general goals of church decoration as pleasure and distraction, with a nod to moral instruction, thereby disavowing several other valences of images of pudenda, such as fertility or moral aversion (the latter for three reasons (81)), and leaving out birthing as another possible reading. Among manuscripts with images that allow sacred and profane to interact is the Psalter and Hours of Jean de Neuville, poet of Arras in the first half of the thirteenth century, whose humorous chansons (cynical pastourelles) have much in common with the program of his book (90–91). The many nude figures in the Rutland Psalter are interpreted as fools, complementing the majesty of David (126–28). Engammare provides an interlude that traces some motifs back to antiquity, noting a “return to the body” in the Gothic period (129). Some nudes, especially acrobats, mermaids, and phalluses, as also some hybrids, may have been copied directly from Roman works, but Engammare follows the conventional Panofskian wisdom that they are transformed so as to suppress sensual responses. Fresher observation is evident in sections on bestiaries and fables, by Fressart (144–69), and on other literary texts by Braet (170–79); the former includes images based on the famous satirical repertory of the fox Renart. One caution for Anglophone readers: “Singe” means both monkey and ape, but the difference is significant, since the ape’s lack of a tail renders its anus visible, and the artists emphasize this; the authors could have clarified this by using “grand singe.”

Chapter 4, “The Iconographic Universe,” by Wirth with other contributors as noted below, circles back over some of the themes already introduced, to consider a few in depth “that leave out nothing of great importance” (181). Adriana Fisch Hartley contributes background information on the physical and social realities of hunting, though her insistence that the practice is a secular ritual seems somewhat superfluous; her metaphorical interpretations are more satisfying (181–206). There follows Wirth’s analysis of games as ritual, including dance and disguises, and a section on caricature and symbolic violence that ranges from the literal (men have to let women win at checkers—ignoring the game of strip invoked by C. J. Campbell, “Courting, Harlotry, and the Art of Gothic Ivory Carving,” Gesta 34 (1995): 11–19), to the satirical, with resonances in the fabliaux (207–25). Wirth views music, dance, and entertainment (jonglerie), including vagabonds, animal musicians, and mocking music, in social contexts that enrich our understanding, though an attempt to dismiss clerical disapproval of street music as insignificant is less effective (228–52). An important section by Frédéric Elsig traces a variety of anti-clerical attitudes back to the papacy itself in the eleventh century, up to the tensions caused by the mendicant orders (276–305). It is also refreshing that he includes some case studies that seek out the religious allegiances of the owner or commissioner of a specific book, through an analysis of the images.

The overall project, as reiterated by Wirth on 329–66, is determined to reduce the high expectations some of us have tended to have for the margins; he sees the prevalent motifs as simply fit for an aristocracy in need of some mild amusement during the long hours of prayer, or even at other times. The observation that comical texts, like the fabliaux, do not have marginal images, whereas they are abundant in devotional books (largely Psalters and Books of Hours) is used to bolster this argument. Having been severely reprimanded for laughing at funny-peculiar phrases in the psalms during school prayer, I am not convinced that priests would have tolerated laughter during mass in the fourteenth century either, when the debate raged over the risibility of Christ. And hedonism is inadequate to explain the dark and menacing aspect of grotesques, dragons, demonic hybrids, and freaks. I left the book with the thought that “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

An extensive bibliography serves well up to 1998, with a few more references before 2005. The lacunae indicate that many thought-provoking recent studies did not enter consideration. An Appendix with a catalogue of the manuscripts examined in depth would have been more useful to the reader than hiding most information on date and ownership in footnotes, especially since the captions to the illustrations only identify manuscripts by shelf numbers.