![]() ![]() ![]() In other words, the medieval person believed that sin and damnation lurked in the borders, while grace and salvation were found in the miniature. This mirror of otherness is meant to have a two-fold function: one to amuse and the other to have a didactic purpose-that is to focus on sinful or “monstrous” behavior that should be remedied by contemplating the central miniature or image. I suggest that the figures’ carnality and monstrous embodiment is a type of mirror of otherness within the intended manuscript reader/viewer. In order to clarify the role these hybrids play in these texts, I ask how they operate in medieval visual culture and how they can be read as a type of other in what may seem to be very pious texts? Taking Michel de Certeau’s essay “Montaigne’s ‘Of Cannibals’: The Savage ‘I’” as my point of departure, I argue that the borderland occupied by the hybrids is a site of disruption and rupture that challenges the authority of the text/main miniature itself. ![]() In this article, I will examine the hybrids (half-men, half-beast, and the monstrous beings) in the margins of medieval psalters and Books of Hours. These hybrids were also known in the Middle Ages as a variant of the term babuini, from which our word baboon is derived. I posit that the hybrids/ babewyns are a type of other in medieval culture, figures onto which the medieval reader would attempt to project and diffuse fears of the outcast and the marginalized, particularly those perceived as sinful. ![]() Humorous, repugnant, or seemingly benign, they act upon the text and/or image like a medieval trickster. These “composite creatures,” or hybrids, as I shall refer to them hereafter, occupy a liminal space where the sacred meets the secular and profane. Here hybrids (half-men, half-beast), grotesques (monstrous beings), and babewyns (simian-like creatures) lurk and make mayhem, always threatening to traverse the edges of the main miniature or text. These edge dwellers are the inhabitants of what the French cultural theorist, Michel de Certeau, might mean when he speaks of the borderland as the space of the other, “the far-off land which substantiates the alterity of the savage.” It is this otherness, relegated to the borders, that we find in the margins of medieval illuminated manuscripts, particularly in psalters and Books of Hours aimed at the laity. 1260 that depicts a map of the earth with Jerusalem at its center and over which Christ presides as Salvator mundi. (Figure 1) As Michael Camille observes, “The further one moves away from the center-point of Jerusalem, the more deformed and alien things become.” Indeed, in the bottom-right edge resides fourteen of the monstrous races including the Blemmyae and the Cynocephali, a race of dog-headed people. This is particularly apparent in an English psalter from ca. I find that Archetypes can be explored in many ways-in song lyrics and saints’ biographies, in writings about compassion and helping others, in trickster figures, and in grotesque imagery.Figure 1:Mappa mundi. I started exploring Ruskin’s ideas on grotesques, and after over four decades the topic continues to attract me. I find the scholarship on these topics to be rich and thought-provoking, worth deeper exploration, as my extensive endnotes suggest. Jung’s and James Hillman’s depth psychology exploring archetypal images also relates to Ruskin’s ideas about fantasies and the fantastic, about dominant imaginative ideas that predate the term “archetype.” Furthermore, Ruskin’s interest in the Gothic in architecture and other areas gave me incentive and curiosity to explore the Gothic style and today’s Goths. Ruskin recognized the vitality in spontaneous playfully weird images, like gargoyles and cartoons. In recent years I have been intrigued by Ruskin’s seminal work on the “grotesque.” His ideas fed into the modern arts of caricatures, the sketchiness and rough unfinished quality in modern paintings. I have a longstanding interest in John Ruskin’s writings about work and craftsmanship, which influenced Gandhi’s philosophy. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |