![]() ![]() ![]() You can see more marginal scenes of the rabbit’s revenge at Sexy Codicology, Colossal, and Kaneko-James’ blog. ![]() Given how often we denizens of the 21st century have trouble getting humor from less than a century ago, it feels satisfying indeed to laugh just as hard at these drolleries as our medieval forebears must have - though many more of us surely get to see them today, circulating as rapidly on social media as they didn’t when confined to the pages of illuminated manuscripts owned only by wealthy individuals and institutions. The practice, however, was especially popular between the 13 th and 15 th centuries. Even readers’ doodles are intriguing to contemporary scholars. These peasants, servants, prostitutes and beggars all found. Some illustrations elaborate doctrines, record events or simply tell stories. Drolleries are amusing, often grotesque, figures drawn on the edges of manuscripts and may be found in works from different parts of Europe throughout the Middle Ages. Medieval image-makers focused attention on the underside of society, the excluded and the ejected. In the later tradition of western European manuscript illumination in the 13th and 14th centuries, animals appear in copious illustrations on the side and bottom margins. Then, of course, we have the bunnies making their attacks while mounted on snails, snail combats being “another popular staple of Drolleries, with groups of peasants seen fighting snails with sticks, or saddling them and attempting to ride them.” A drollerie (also spelled as drollery) is a type of marginalia found on Medieval manuscripts. The images in these handwritten texts are called illuminations because of the radiant glow created by the gold, silver, and other colors. We see this in the Middle English nickname Stickhare, a name for cowards” - and in all the drawings of “tough hunters cowering in the face of rabbits with big sticks.” From the margins of manuscripts, art historians are also able to gain a better understanding of how manuscripts were made. The Making of a Medieval Book explores the materials and techniques used to create the lavishly illuminated manuscripts produced in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Illustrated monks pull faces at those who look at the text, cats chase mice, and people chase each other with knives. This enjoyment of the “world turned upside down” produced the drollery genre of “the rabbit’s revenge,” one “often used to show the cowardice or stupidity of the person illustrated. ![]()
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