To my blog readers: The next three posts are a bit different! The below details why and how and when and what-naught, but basically this was a school project that I had a lot of fun with. I got my pictures from Carl, over at GotMedieval, so thanks to him for his funny and clever posts!
My goal here is to write several short stories of above average quality using marginalia as illustrations. Marginalia/Illuminations for our purposes are illustrations in the margins or text of pre-medieval to late renaissance work, largely unrelated to the subject at hand, commissioned by someone who owned the book, but not necessarily included in the original book. Often the characters portrayed in the marginalia are seen making fun of or reflecting poorly on those in the text or illustrations. While most often the margins are decorated with flowers or fruits or other trivialities, monkeys, dogs, bears, people, demons, dragons, foxes, birds, horses, stags, and rabbits frequent the margins I was able to find.
Hopefully the stories will exemplify some themes of the period, but I will mostly be trying to work with the marginalia illuminations I was able to find and tell stories marginally less trashy than those I associate with the period (Chaucer, Sir Gawain, George R.R. Martin, etc.) The stories will largely concern the animals involved in the marginalia and any humans present. All three stories take place after the return of Christ and the altogether less prophesied culling of unworthy souls from the earth by Satan. I parody two ideas, one from modern Christianity (Christ has taken all of his own to heaven, leaving the Earth behind and disregarding scriptural bodily resurrection) and one from medieval Christianity (Christ has left behind a good deal of people for reasons of widely varying validity, to be taken to hell by Satan for punishment.) Earth, Christ and Satan leave to the animals as a neutral realm.
I’ll be writing one story about demons that should be slightly more intense than the others, about what happens to souls left behind by Christ. I’ll leave the demons fully demonized and resist playing with the idea of whether a being can actually be motivated by evil without thinking it is good. There will be one story about dogs and rabbits that will be a bit funny but not hilarious, asserting that lovable, kind creatures such as dogs are not meant to hunt mean baby-eaters such as rabbits, but that man’s existence made it so. A third story will deal with monkeys and people, and be utterly ridiculous, with both Christ and Satan leaving monkeys behind even though they are all but human, and a few individual monkeys looking for their place in the world while they wonder why neither side of the eternal conflict wanted them. None of this reflects very serious religious views (or other views – at times I work to include ideals or stereotypes long dead, and either no longer or never relevant,) and most everything reflects my hope that you will be amused and never dismayed. After much ado, I’ll move into the stories! Happy reading.
"Intro to Marginalia Illumination Short Stories" Introduction © Ben Clardy V
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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