Who has never scribbled in the margins of a notebook during an overly boring lesson? England by the monotony of a course on the competitive market or particle physics, we filled our borders of caricatures, scribbles, discreet parts of hanging with our neighbor of the table. (Yes, it was before smartphones.) As if the margin was the last refuge of creativity, the last remedy for school platitudes.
Thirteen centuries earlier, our distant ancestors did the same. Towards VIIIe A century, although the majority of the population knows how to read or write, the clergy asserts itself as the guardian of ancient knowledge. The libraries of abbeys are full of precious works that speak of arithmetic, geography, natural sciences, religion. Above all, the monks spend most of their time copying manuscripts. In the cold light of the scriptorium (the room reserved for the activity of copyists), the scribes diligently reproduce psalters, treaties and hours of hours, while waiting for the twilight to deliver them from this task … until the next day.
A profession of faith
It is an ant, exhausting, painful, laborious work. The purpose of the exercise is to atone for his sins by an act of redemptive suffering. “The work of the copyist is a meritorious work, which benefits the soul, while the work of the fields only benefits on the belly”professes the English poet Alcuin at the VIIIe century.
Under the supervision of a superior brother, the copy monks work for hours in an ice cream, hands with cramps. In silence: the only authorized noise is the screen of feathers! Curved in front of their writing, they produce no more than 200 lines per day. At this rate, it takes about a year to copy a copy of the Bible.
Since they are forbidden to speak, some scribes are heard in the margins of the works they copy. Historians have deciphered many complaints in these marginalia (Marginalium in the singular). “Thank goodness, it will soon be dark”sighs one of them. “Now that I have copied everything, for the love of Christ, that I am given to drink”implore another. Laning from the cold, the quality of the ink or the parchment, their sore muscles or their tired eyes, the copyists discreetly testify to the harshness of their working conditions.
Others, rather than feeling out of their fate, prefer to desecrate the text by spicy it with grotesque illuminations. From the 13the Century, in fact, the margins of French, English or Dutch manuscripts were colonized by bizarre illustrations: knights fighting snails, psychopathic rabbits armed to the ears, monkeys playing cornemuse…
We call “humor” these graphic and grotesque fantasies which give pride of place to irreverent images and gryllas – burlesque creatures of animal or human figures -, with a profusion of excrement, flatulence and genitals (which at least proves that the sense of male humor has changed little since).
A disguised social criticism?
Some illuminations are undoubtedly intended to shock the reader between two holy psalms, even to tickle the dogmas of the church, recently blown by a wind of reform. A fox wearing a miter (the episcopal headdress) and preaching in front of geese could evoke the stupidity of “flocks”, which blindly follow ecclesiastical preaching.
A nun raising penis on a tree touches the sacrilege in the face of the Christian ideal of the pious and erased Virgin.
Other more prosaic illustrations question social relationships under the guise of parodies or drawn because. An illustrated saynet taken from the Breviary for the use of Verdun From Renaud de Bar shows a troop of dogs to assault a castle guarded by rabbits. The metaphor was clear for medieval readership: it represents the conquest of a woman … and not only of her heart, since the Latin word designating the animal –cuniculus– will eventually designate the female sex.
Why represent animals rather than human beings? The reason for the reversal of roles, recurring in medieval iconography, first makes it possible to laugh at powerful. In the margins of the manuscripts, in fact, the hunter – generally a wealthy aristocrat – becomes the prey, while preux knights detaine the legions of snails!
Funny shops overturn balances and power relations, putting everyone back in their place … at least until the XIVe century, period of their progressive erasure in favor of wiser illuminations based on vegetable mosaics.
In the following century, the democratization of printing works will eventually make the work of copy monks obsolete. This will not prevent the industrialists from the book from indulging in a few jokes. In 1631, in London, two printers re -edited a Bible by replacing divine command “You don’t commit adultery” by “You commit adultery”.
Inattention error or intentional forgetting? Many scribes having been hired in the printing workshops to assert their talents, it is possible that some have continued their silent rebellion there. Anyway, this shell has earned the “perverse bible” of 1631 a place of choice in collectors’ libraries!
