I know I probably come off like some sort of pervazoid, ((My official pervazoid ranking is a rather unimpressive Number 57–hardly in the same class as the esteemed Flopper Mr. Dan McCoy, Pervazoid Number 1.)) what with all the naked snail-riding, ((Not to be confused with naked-snail riding.)) tree-nesting genitalia, and the rest of the medieval porn lying around the place. ((Even in the prayer books!)) But it’s hardly my fault. I start an innocent line of research, and there it is, staring me in the face. Like tonight, I was working on a post about medieval and modern framing conventions. ((Less boring than it sounds.)) In need of a fresh image of a blemmyae, I started poking around in the library catalogs, until I stumbled across this:
Oh, sure, it’s just a random naked dude cold chilling in the upper margin. Hardly worth comment, really. I’ve featured far worse than that over the years. It’s just I wasn’t really expecting to find him in the margins of a book described by the Yale Press thus:
Produced for a nun at the turn of the fourteenth century, […the Rothschild Canticles] served as an aid to mystical devotions in which images played as central a role as the written word. Visionary depictions of Paradise, the Song of Songs, the Virgin Mary, the Trinity, and hundreds of other subjects based on texts ranging from the Bible to the Lives of the Desert Fathers together form a devotional program that transports the reader toward contemplative union with God.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions they say, but has anyone ever said that the road toward contemplative union with God is paved with naked dudes? Because it’s not just the one. And it’s not just that they’re naked. They’re naked posing with swords:
Naked posing with a sword and poised to lop off his own leg: ((I hope it’s the leg he’s aiming for.))
Naked and pretending to be Wile E. Coyote–lookout, little dog things!:
Naked and being juggled by a plate spinner:
Naked and hanging upside down over a guy who seems to be offering his extended rump as a landing cushion:
Naked and jousting another naked guy while riding a goat backwards:
Naked and swinging a stork around by its neck while his naked friend humps a dog:
How do we square all this nakidity with a collection of inspirational prayers and lessons made for a nun to aid in spiritual communion with the divine? I suppose we could always do as one scholar did, in this, my favorite footnote ever: ((And I’m a guy who knows a little something about footnotes.))
2 The marginalia present an additional powerful counterpart to the framed images; however, the meaning attached to their presence is not within the scope of this article.
Punted like a pro. Me, I’m too easily distracted by the margins to be able to discuss the apparent gender ambiguity of Christ in the main image on a page and its implications for normative heterosexualized spiritual desire without going “Hey, look, a monkey!”
A monkey, I might add, who seems to be getting awful friendly with that red-footed gryllus there. ((But figuring out why is beyond the scope of this post.))