In the pages of medieval psalters, prayer books and other religious texts, a freakshow of strange hybrid creatures, killer rabbits, men riding snails, horses riding men, and animals playing the rebec or psaltery can often be seen cavorting across the margins, seemingly at odds with the reverent texts they are supposed to illustrate.
These strange drawings are called marginalia, and they can often be found lurking at the borders of the gorgeous illuminations that fill the pages of these books:
Clearly, the artists who created these elaborate illuminations often got a little carried away. The fronds unfurling from illuminated letters sometimes turned into animals, and the animals in turn sprouted leafy fronds:
Of course, many of the animals depicted in medieval art are symbolic. But it's anyone's guess as to what is symbolized by this image of a grotesque knight doing battle with snails:
It's hard to know what to make of some of these images from the British Library. Were the grotesque creatures added in later by another artist with a twisted sense of humor? Or were they specially commissioned by an irreverent patron?
As the Encyclopedia Britannica says about the medieval books of hours, "These lavishly decorated texts, of small dimensions, varied in content according to their patrons' desires."
If that is so, we can only wonder about the patrons who wanted something like this:
