The focus of this book is luxury manuscripts that are devotional in purpose: psalters and a book of hours, guides to personal piety and prayer. Their patrons and readers included the wealthy laity, both women and men. In central positions on the page, conventional religious pictures illuminate the adjacent text. In the margins of those same pages, illustrations appear of a radically different kind: essentially mysterious, often playful, proto-surreal, and in a significant minority of cases, frankly obscene, with images including bare buttocks raised aloft and anal stimulation by a trumpet or flute. This side-by-side appearance of the sacred and the extremely profane, although shocking to readers of today, was ubiquitous in medieval devotional guidebooks and obviously accepted as normal by their earliest readers. The possible meaning and purpose of such “drolleries” as they are called, especially in a sacred context, have long engaged the attention of scholars. Previous studies in the field are well integrated by Martine Clouzot in her insightful new book.
The author achieves an original approach by focusing on pictures at the intersection of certain topics and their likely effects on the reader: forbidden sex, especially “homosexual,” musical instruments and performance, including the ars nova (complex tempo and polyphony) in song, fantastic sights (of humans, animals, and human-animal hybrids), and the all-male preserve of liberal arts education, always in the context of a guide to prayer (8-9). As the author wisely advises, there are insights to be gained, but conclusions will be tempered with modesty: “To understand the purposes for which these figures were created, and obviously perceived, is not easy” (9, emphasis added). This multi-theme approach presents a complex weave for the reader, to which I will try to do justice in this review. At times, the data presented will support a different interpretation from that provided by the author, although her perspectives are always well defended, important, and stimulating.
As befitting the limited scope of the volume, comprising under 90 pages of text with 25 illustrations (some repeated), Clouzot has chosen to focus on two of the many devotional manuscripts with marginalia that align with her title themes: the Maastricht [book of] Hours, London, BL, MS Stowe 17 (ten pictures); and the Gorleston Psalter, London, BL, MS Add. 49622 (nine pictures). The other manuscripts with pictures reproduced in the book, gleaned for comparison purposes, are as follows: the Alphonso Psalter, London, BL, MS Add. 24686 (one picture); the Luttrell Psalter, London, BL, MS Add. 42130 (two pictures); and Les Vœux du paon de Jacques de Longuyon, a secular poem, New York, PML, MS G24 (three pictures).
All of these manuscripts date from the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century. All are distinguished for their illuminations, including the drolleries, some pornographic, some merely suggestive. A caveat: Clouzot or her publisher have made the unusual choice to provide black and white line drawings of the original illustrations instead of photographic reproductions, with some loss of detail compared to their prototypes. In the book, each drawing appears in isolation, with no complete page reproduced from a manuscript. I was able to access none of the manuscripts complete in digitized form. Despite these unfortunate lacunes, the author’s arguments are adequately supported by the illustrations as they appear in the volume, and many individual pictures in their original form can be found online. Whenever possible, I have accessed online full-color reproductions of the images to verify the details and view the full context on the page.
The Introduction to the volume, with its themes resumed in the closing chapter, is integral to the work as a whole. The reader is invited to time-travel into the consciousness of thedestinataire of the Maastricht book of hours, presumed to be a noblewoman of the diocese of Liège, as she handled the book in her private oratory in the course of singing her daily prayers. For example, what did she think and feel when the book was open to folio 61v, where two crouching monkeys are seen in the lower margin of the page, one blowing a flute into the clearly marked anus of the other, while extending his own naked buttocks aloft (8)? Or turning the pages, when she viewed the image of a naked man riding backwards and upside down on horseback, lifting the horse’s tail and thrusting the mouth of a trumpet deep inside (8, pictured on 29)?
To address these questions, not only for the lady of Liège, but for medieval readers both women and men, clerical and lay, Clouzot would have us first remember that these guides to devotion were produced under church authority, but responding to a culture in some ways not as prudish as our own (10). Chapter 1, “Autres temps, autres mœurs,” sets the historical context for the flourishing of music along with the other liberal arts, including grammar, in the university as well as the courtly setting. These developments happened concurrently with the rise of luxury manuscript illumination that often featured the portrayal of musicians and musical instruments in prominent positions on the page, often including King David with his harp portrayed in the initial of Psalm 1 (14). Musicians at the margins were frequently monkeys or hybrid creatures. Per Jean Wirth, explicit portrayals (sexual or scatological) comprise only one or two percent of marginal images in devotional books (14), with a high percentage of these depicting musical instruments and/or the production of sound. Male-to-male sodomy is more often portrayed than heterosexual sex, per Clouzot a reflection of the all-male clerical culture that produced these works of devotion (16-17). At times, in the chapters that follow, the author explains the purpose of an image in terms of a moral message that it conveys. At all times, however, she asserts a value in the transgressive quality of the image per se, as this very quality may evoke an emotional response in the reader that, along with other textual content, can direct the soul to salvation.
In Chapter 2, ‘Des images obscènes pour les âmes,” Clouzot introduces the richly illuminated Gorleston Psalter and its putative patron, the English count John de Warenne (19-26; see note 1, below), whom she calls “le prince aux lapins trompettistes” (80). Playing on the patron’s name, the two illuminators adorned the marginalia with plentiful images of rabbits, which in Latin and French have a sexual connotation. This quality is seen, per Clouzot, in the picture of a rabbit emerging from the mouth of a comically elongated trumpet sounded by a naked male humanoid sporting a tail (21-23). To my mind, the transgressive effect of this image is not so much its content, more fanciful than obscene, but its location next to Habakkuk 3:16, where the prophet voices his gut-wrenching terror at the noise of God rushing through natural places of the earth on his way to punish the wicked (22). Other images in the Gorleston Psalter, as well as similar contemporary manuscripts, more directly portray the act of sodomy or its invitation by posture and exposure of the anus, with the resemblance of the bagpipe to male genitalia a recurring theme (24-31). The final section of the chapter asserts a moral critique of all-male clerical culture through clerical figures personified as bestial, for example, in pictures from the “school of monkeys” topos: in the Maastricht psalter, a hominid teaches two schoolboy monkeys from a music score, while a third boy is beaten on the bare buttocks, anus visible, by another teacher, an allusion to man-boy sexual abuse in the school setting (33). The portrayal of a schoolroom also serves as a reminder that even the rules of grammar can be explained as a moral rebuke to sodomy (34-37). New developments in music—the polyphonic organum, measurable tempo, and more accurate musical notation—were also frequently described in terms of grammar, animal body parts such as the cauda, and forbidden sex within the all-male preserves of the clergy (37-38).
In Chapter 3, “La notation musicale: anatomies et zoomorphisme sexuels,” the author transitions from images of sodomy at the margins of the manuscript page, to the eroticism that is centrally placed but only implied, notably inside the initial letter C of Psalm 97, the “Cantate domino.” The conventional image adorning this position was “singers at the lectern,” an ensemble of clerics, of course all male, standing close together, apparently swaying their bodies as they sing an organum, and all attending to a score with musical notes on a stand (50-54). In the Luttrell psalter, three of the five singers have suggestive, o-shaped open mouths, with their wide lips starkly outlined (51-52), all clearly visible in the original image accessible online. The same initial in the Gorleston psalter presents three singers at a lectern, their faces dignified, with one pointing up to an illumination in the same initial showing the annunciation to the shepherds (Luke 2:8-14), but also conveying through their angled postures in song “la sensualité des corps masculins” (54). (The Gorleston image is not reproduced in the book, but accessible online. I find it not satirical, but a celebration of church choristers as a figure of the heavenly host.) As the author proceeds to explain, all of these pictures of liturgical group singing should be understood in the context of the controversy over the rise of the polyphonicorganum, known in one of its forms as the copula, a term also applying to sex (55-57). This thirteenth- and fourteenth-century innovation transformed the unison Gregorian chant by having a lower voice, the “tenor,” sing the traditional plainchant, while at least one higher voice cantillated melismas with rapidly changing notes. All of this was condemned by a series of theologians cited by Clouzot as modeling the act of sodomy, arousing indecent pleasure, corrupting masculinity by the sounding of higher-pitched voices, and obscuring the words of the liturgy (55-61). However, even in visual portrayal, this music has the power “faire agir/to move to action,” and in this power may reside a salvific experience for the reader at prayer (61).
Chapter 4, “Obscenité et transgression: les voies de la conversion et du salut/salvation?” elaborates on the means of this morally positive effect through transgressive pictures, “as paradoxical as it can seem” (61). For example, a famous drollery in the Gorleston psalter portrays a crouching monster seen in profile with a head that appears to bellow through its open mouth, while in place of a rear end, it has a second head, also with orifice agape, out of which protrudes the naked lower half of a man with anus visible (67). Such images create a “jocus” by “inversions” that arouse to laughter (62-64), while also portraying grammatical barbarisms such as the tmesis, a misplaced pause in the middle of a word, into which a syllable is improperly inserted (66-67). Bodies, including this one, are pictured with members “amputate[ed],” often completed with body parts not appropriate for them (67). All of these pictorial devices carry the moral hazard that a preacher was said to incur by overusing the “histrion[ics]” of a jongleur (68-69), which intersect with effeminacy in the male performer (72, 75, 77), as well as the anxiety afflicting clergy, including singers, that their way of life was less than fully masculine (73, 74, 79). However, the very ubiquity of such drolleries in prestigious manuscripts suggests that they had the effect of reinforcing moral norms (80).
Chapter 5 is titled “Retour à ‘la dame du diocèse de Liège’ et a John de Warenne, ‘le prince aux lapins trompettistes’: images et musicalités des émotions.” How did transgressive marginalia in a prayerbook act upon the inner life of a reader, such as the lady of Liège, to serve the purpose of her spiritual conversion (80)? The answer, per Clouzot, is to be found in medieval theology and science of the emotions. Emotional arousal per se was an effect cultivated by preachers as the root of repentance and salvation, via the emotions of compunction and contrition. The term “passions” referring to the emotions, with its obvious connection to the passion of Christ, was current in scholastic theology (84). Per the rediscovered works of Aristotle and Galen, emotions were awakened by sensory perceptions and acted on the body as well as the memory and the soul, all of these comprising a force for persuasion (85-87). Exactly what feelings might be aroused by the picture of a rabbit emerging from a trumpet blown by a naked humanoid, or a monkey sodomized by a flute? Whether pleasure or moral rejection, the emotional shock was equally adapted to the purpose of spiritual renewal and even a kind of instruction by allegory (86, 94). Hybrid human-animal figures, for example a bishop playing a bagpipe to a dancing nun, both with the lower bodies of animals, appeared adjacent to Bible verses announcing the Word made flesh (Maastricht Hours, 89-90). Was the lady moved by these pictures, and others like them, to orient her inner life toward God? Did their missing members remind her of her own spiritual incompleteness, moving her toward contrition? The author wisely concedes that the answer is complicated: “Il est impossible de le savoir” (91).
In her Conclusion, Clouzot reviews the emotional puissance of the drolleries and their redemptive purpose, while reinforcing the transgressive theme of gender “fluid[ity]” (94) as an important effect of the images, especially those involving the production of music. She makes the interesting claim that these devotional books, and others like them, role-modeled daily devotions for women, always featuring prayers for their menfolk, while men like John de Warenne were expected to pray, but not as often (94-95). No evidence is produced for this. Perhaps a future study is planned. Another issue not discussed in the book is the appearance of similar transgressive marginalia in manuscripts of secular works, including Les Vœux du paon, referenced in the book—were these drolleries also devotional in purpose? Or were they simply expected by wealthy patrons, in a luxury manuscript on any theme? Taken as a whole, the present volume is an important contribution to scholarship that encourages the questions it is sure to inspire. The spirit of inquiry is integrated throughout. As the author insightfully observes, the perception of these images by the reader, especially the woman reader, “reste un mystère” (94). By beginning and ending her study with questions that awaken the reader’s curiosity, surely an emotion, the author has borrowed a tactic she identifies in the devotional books themselves. This reader was moved to follow the riches of her argument, and also to ask more questions.
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Note:
1. Clouzot cites Margot M. Nishimura and David Nishimura, “Rabbits, Warrens, and Warenne: The Patronage of the Gorleston Psalter,” in Kathryn A. Smith and Carol H. Krinsky, eds., Tributes to Lucy Freeman Sandler: Studies in Illuminated Manuscripts (London: Harvey Miller, 2007): 205-218.