Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Essays in Art and Culture)

A gargoyle lurks at the corner of a Gothic cathedral. A monstrous face peers from the margin of a medieval text. At the far reaches of cultural spaces a chorus of odd and arresting figures assembles, commenting endlessly on the world it surveys. What these characters are doing at the margins is the subject of Michael Camille's new book, an exhilarating account of the medieval imagination testing--and defining--its boundaries.Where others have isolated the marginal image as a detail, Camille considers such marginalia in direct and complex relation to the whole work. Ranging with graceful authority through the culture of the Middle Ages, from art to architecture, music to illustrated manuscripts, courtly romances to social rituals, he finds in the margins a distorted yet apt reflection of medieval conventions. It is here at the edge--of the monastery, the cathedral, the court, the city--that medieval artists found room for experimentation, for glossing, parodying, modernizing, and questioning cultural authority without ever undermining it. Viewing marginalia in their proper social and cultural context, Camille reveals scandalous and subversive aspects, as well as apparently paradoxical stabilizing functions. He rejects oppositions such as high and low, profane and sacred, and instead projects a vision of medieval culture in which marginal resistance, inversion, and transgression play an integral, even necessary, role.Chimeras as disruptions of religious order; gargoyles as embodiments of fears and temptations; scatological drawings as manifestations of crisis in the chivalric class; charivari as ritual reinscriptions of social norms: Image on the Edge presents a vivid picture of a medieval world in which contradictions were not only tolerated, but worked with exquisite detail into the very fabric of society. With a richness of expression in keeping with his subject--and with a wealth of sumptuous illustrations--Camille illuminates these details; in doing so, he revises and enhances our understanding of medieval culture's self-representation.