The variety of different forms is so great and wonderful everywhere that it is more pleasant to read statues than books, marvelling at them all day instead of meditating on the laws of God all day.' But the horned animal turns into a horse to its back. Here is the beast: a horse from the front, and a half-goose from the back.

Here, a four-legged one has a snake’s tail, there a fish with a head of a four-legged animal.

'In monasteries, before the eyes of the reading brothers, what does this ridiculous monstrosity, this strange ugly beauty, or beautiful ugliness do? What are these unclean monkeys doing here, these wild lions, these ugly centaurs, these half-human half-beasts, these spotted tigers, these fighting warriors, these hunters who blow their horns? You will see many bodies with one head or, conversely, one body with many heads. Back in the 12th century, the Catholic theologian and mystic Bernard of Clairvaux was surprised and indignant no less when he asked: And then you draw a curious figure in the margins of your manuscript (just like someone 7 centuries after you would draw faces in his notebook at a boring meeting) and imagine that this is your little hello to someone who will read the book many years later the book, on the rewriting of which you have sacrificed your only God-given life.įor the sake of fairness, note that not only for us, modern viewers, viewing such images causes cognitive dissonance. cause an explosion of laughter to cause the beneficial surge of oxygen to the brain. Some kind of outburst, something that would interrupt the routine, e. But there is no escape from the 'burnout syndrome' (or the machinations of the devil): monotonous activity requires relaxation. From year to year, your handwriting becomes more and more perfected, and your drawings more filigree. Gorgeous black characters are born from your pen. And here you are, hunched over by a candle stub, and write letter by letter, vignette after vignette. And regardless of the season, it is semi-dark.

Your cell, depending on the season, is stuffy or chilly. Gutenberg would not invent printing soon, or maybe he would not invent it at all, how do you know it in your 12th century? Humanity has not yet bothered with air conditioning, ergonomic chairs or a table lamp. Month after month, year after year - for decades! With only breaks for Holy Mass and a meagre meal. Imagine that you are a monk of the 9th, 11th or 13th century, and your obedience, which you will perform day after day, year after year, for decades (unless the plague or consumption does not teleport you to the outworld earlier) is a painstaking rewriting of liturgical texts. How is this even possible?Here is one of the witty explanations for the appearance of such strange and sometimes obscene pictures in the margins of sacred texts. The marginals below are taken from the Maastricht Book of Hours - a Dutch manuscript liturgical book of the first half of the 14th century, that is, theoretically (taking into account factors of both time and space), Bosch could even be familiar with it. Moreover, all sorts of crazy hybrids of people with horses, scorpions, birds, snails and other amphibians and artiodactyls, as well as 'frankensteins' whose legs are sewn to the head without a body, and an extra face (often more beautiful than the main one!) has grown on the bottom are waiting for you. Right on the pages of books of hours, missal books and psalteries, valiant knights fight with snails, ladies courtly communicate with monkeys and fall into the arms of dragons, hares play music on organs, and bears play bagpipes, while people behave like pure animals, demonstrating those physiological acts that are usually hidden from human eyes.

Anyone who flips through the liturgical manuscripts of the 11-16th centuries for the first time (fortunately, now such an opportunity has appeared in digital libraries), risks experiencing a cultural shock.

Medieval manuscript art snails