![]() 32r and 68r act essentially as book-ends as they start the first and last hours, but this isn’t where our picture story ends. 68r, an original border ending the Hours with Compline, shows grotesques dancing around the text. On 32r, Wing illuminates the arma Christi, instruments used in Christ’s torture this folio correlates to the hour of Matins, opening the Hours of the Passion. I’ll be looking at three different border illuminations that tell Jesus’s Passion through illustration and order, and I’ll tackle it in order. Wing’s floral imagery will be important to the Hours of the Passion’s illumination framework.īefore we go any further discussing Wing’s borders, a couple of things need to be noted. Through these examples and other borders of MS W.441, we can see that he utilizes bright colors and subtle shadowing to make these lifelike images pop. Wing’s artistic calling card is beautiful floral illuminations on striking gold backgrounds. In addition to MS W.441, he illuminated borders for Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum MS 193, and Yale, Beinecke MS 287A, only a few on a list of his contributions. He also worked for other commissioners as a professional facsimilist, and a pretty convincing one at that (Furlong 7). Wing was no stranger to working with medieval manuscripts, even “damaged surviving manuscripts,” for Jarman (Backhouse 80). William Caleb Wing, the talented modern illuminator of this manuscript, engaged with original medieval borders to create border illuminations and full-page miniatures. Many of these pretty illuminations, however, were commissioned by John Boykett Jarman in the nineteenth century. Īccording to the manuscript description, the text was written in the sixteenth century in Flanders. The second major deviation in this manuscript is the illuminations. MS W.441 instead centers around the Hours of the Passion, making it more Christ-based (for more on this absence in manuscripts, see Christian Gallichio’s post ). For one, this Book of Hours lacks the very thing that makes Books of Hours what they are: the Hours of the Virgin (Weick 60 Reinburg 209). She says that “the armored snail fighting the armored knight is a reminder of the inevitability of death,” a sentiment captured in Psalm 58 of the Bible: “ Like a snail that melteth away into slime, they shall be taken away like a dead-born child, they shall not see the sun.Welcome to the strangeness of Baltimore, Walters Art Gallery MS W.441 ! A few things set this manuscript apart from the everyday Book of Hours. Silly knight, it’s just a snail!”įor Digital Medievalist, Lisa Spangenberg floated another idea. The valiant snails could be a commentary on social oppression, or it could just be medieval humor, says Got Medieval: “We’re supposed to laugh at the idea of a knight being afraid of attacking such a ‘heavily armored’ opponent. The British Library says that the scene could represent the Resurrection, or it could be a stand-in for the Lombards, “a group vilified in the early Middle Ages for treasonous behaviour, the sin of usury, and ‘non-chivalrous comportment in general.’” No one knows what, exactly, the scenes really mean. Photo: Brunetto Latini’s Li Livres dou Tresor, c. “But the ubiquity of these depictions doesn’t make them any less strange,” says the British Library, rounding up a number of examples of the slimy battles. Usually, the knight is drawn so that he looks worried, stunned, or shocked by his tiny foe.Įpic snail-on-knight combat showed up as often in medieval manuscripts as Kilroy across Europe. ![]() Sometimes the snail is all the way across the page, sometimes right under the knight’s foot. ![]() Sometimes the snail is monstrous, sometimes tiny. They’re everywhere! Sometimes the knight is mounted, sometimes not. ![]() As Got Medieval writes, “You get these all the time in the margins of Gothic manuscripts.”Īnd I do mean all the time. It’s a great unsolved mystery of medieval manuscripts. And scattered through this marginalia is an oddly recurring scene: a brave knight in shining armor facing down a snail. It’s common to find, in the blank spaces of 13th- and 14th-century English texts, sketches and notes from medieval readers. ![]()
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