Today’s post features really looong marginal images, so I’ll let you take a moment to get your scroll wheels properly maintenanced.
All set?
Meet the long-necked bird. He lives in the margins of University of California, Berkeley’s Robbins MS 104 (a 14th-century copy of Boniface VIII’s Liber sextus):
You’ll notice Mr. Bird seems to be feeding on the acanthus leaves that adorn the page’s top margin. This isn’t that strange. Lots of marginal creatures are drawn eating pieces of the page border. Take this guy, found a few pages later, who seems to have a taste for the little gold decorative balls on the page, like those that the long-necked bird’s long-neck squiggles around.
What’s that? Those balls he’s eating look awfully lumpy? OK, you got me. Those aren’t decorative gold balls. They’re digested acanthus leaves, courtesy of the Mr. Bird:
Nothing like a seven-hundred-year-old poop coprophagy joke to get the week started right.