Just a quick pair of marginal images for you this week. From the bottom margin of the opening page of The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek MS 78 D40, a fourteenth-century Festal missal illuminated by Petrus de Raimbaucourt, a monkey rides off to hunt on a ram.
The thing that always strikes me about medieval hunting illuminations is how many hounds it takes to catch a single stag. Here there’s four chasing the poor thing. And in this next image, from Bodleian Library MS Douce 336, a fifteenth-century copy of the Miroir du Monde, there’s ten hounds (and eleven men and five women) per stag:
But at least two of the hounds get to splash around in the pool with the stag, and as this hot summer drags on, that seems like a pretty good idea to me.