Helping hands and feathered friends
In an age before highlighters and marker pens, authors used comic illustrations and wordplay to alert readers to key pieces of text
Marginalia wasn’t only employed to make manuscripts look beautiful, express religious devotion or indulge in a little irreverence. It also had more functional purposes, such as acting as memory aids.
Today, we might use a highlighter pen to draw attention to a key piece of text. Back in the Middle Ages, however, the indicator of choice was something called the manicule. Taken from the Latin for ‘little hand’, the manicule was what can only be described as a disembodied pointing finger. In the image of a tiny 13th-century Bible (above right), we can see our reader has decorated theirs with a rather fetching cuff. Given the diminutive wording (these lines are less than 5mm tall), this becuffed hand would have proved particularly useful.
A pointing hand is an obvious choice of highlighter. Some scribes, however, chose
to be a little more playful – like the creator of John of Arderne’s ‘Medical Treatises’, shown below right and bottom. In this manuscript, offering insights into the practice of surgery in the medieval period, marginal images helped the readers visualise procedures, instruments and herbs. The marginal scheme remained largely unchanged across different copies of his texts, and even when it was translated from Latin into English.
As with manicules, the marginalia directed readers to particular pieces of text – with the help of a series of visual jokes and wordplay. In the image right, an owl indicates a discussion of cancer of the rectum, whose symptoms included a swelling known as a ‘bubo’. Why an owl? Because the Latin word for owl was also ‘bubo’. If the reader needed to locate this section quickly, they simply had to search for this feathered ‘bubo’ in the margins.