Throughout a number of medieval manuscripts, beginning in the Thirteenth Century through the Fourteenth, there are dozens of examples of marginalia sporting the same motif: gallant knights in full regalia engaged in combat with enormous snails. Trying to understand what people did, how they did it, and perhaps most importantly why they did it, is often as imaginative an endeavor as it is a scientific one.Īnd in the realm of strange secrets and curious customs, I would like to present this: It’s these perpetual puzzles and seductive secrets that make the study of history such an interesting endeavor. But we will never know for certain.Īnd that’s rather exciting. Experts love to theorize on things they can’t really prove. And we will probably never know for sure who the Man in the Iron Mask really was. We will very likely never know what ancient Sumerian sounded like. We will never discover the body of the historical Jesus Christ – and if we do, we would not be able to recognize it as such. We will always discover bits and pieces that don’t fit the narratives we’ve crafted to describe the lives of those who came before us, and there are some pieces of the historical that have simply been lost forever. One of the coolest things about the study of history is that there is no possible way for us to know everything. It has been edited slightly to remove some infamatory in-jokes about the academic validity of methods used by certain Art History documentary presenters. It’s not exactly the height of academia (I’m going to art school, yo), but I thought some people might find it interesting as an overview of the material. It’s about snails fighting knights and how weird that is, and how we basically have no idea why people drew them in the margins of their super-important-crazy-expensive manuscripts. She says that “the armored snail fighting the armored knight is a reminder of the inevitability of death,” a sentiment captured in Psalm 58 of the Bible: “ Like a snail that melteth away into slime, they shall be taken away like a dead-born child, they shall not see the sun.This is the final paper I wrote for my Art History 107 class. Silly knight, it’s just a snail!”įor Digital Medievalist, Lisa Spangenberg floated another idea. The valiant snails could be a commentary on social oppression, or it could just be medieval humor, says Got Medieval: “We’re supposed to laugh at the idea of a knight being afraid of attacking such a ‘heavily armored’ opponent. The British Library says that the scene could represent the Resurrection, or it could be a stand-in for the Lombards, “a group vilified in the early Middle Ages for treasonous behaviour, the sin of usury, and ‘non-chivalrous comportment in general.’” No one knows what, exactly, the scenes really mean. Photo: Brunetto Latini’s Li Livres dou Tresor, c. “But the ubiquity of these depictions doesn’t make them any less strange,” says the British Library, rounding up a number of examples of the slimy battles. Usually, the knight is drawn so that he looks worried, stunned, or shocked by his tiny foe.Įpic snail-on-knight combat showed up as often in medieval manuscripts as Kilroy across Europe. Sometimes the snail is all the way across the page, sometimes right under the knight’s foot. Sometimes the snail is monstrous, sometimes tiny. They’re everywhere! Sometimes the knight is mounted, sometimes not. As Got Medieval writes, “You get these all the time in the margins of Gothic manuscripts.”Īnd I do mean all the time. It’s a great unsolved mystery of medieval manuscripts. And scattered through this marginalia is an oddly recurring scene: a brave knight in shining armor facing down a snail. It’s common to find, in the blank spaces of 13th- and 14th-century English texts, sketches and notes from medieval readers.
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