Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art

"Michael Camille was a fascinating art historian who died too young. He did, in a sense, what Leo Steinberg did. He said, “Let’s look at a bunch of stuff that nobody really noticed before, or they found playful, or just weird.” He argued that one could read the margins of manuscripts as responding to what was going on in the text; sometimes in very literal and literary ways and sometimes in more abstract ways. He opened people’s eyes to the fact that you could have a very solemn text that was created by and for monastic patrons and the margins of the page could depict monkeys fucking each other, or cranes sodomising lions. Rather than think of these things as light relief, he argues that they had significance. He does it brilliantly, and he adduces texts and sociology and talks about the different contexts of margins and marginality. This is helpful for me because when I look at manuscripts made for Jews, I’m at an advantage because in the Jewish tradition the marginal area of manuscripts and printed book serve particularly as the commentary area. In a way this is a thesis ready-made for the study of medieval visual culture created for Jews. I just love this idea of the literally edgy. My next book is called Extremities: Mapping the Margins of Jewish Visual Culture and it’s about literal margins as well as conceptual ones. So Camille was a tremendous influence and I’m sorry that he’s left this world. Yes, you could. It indicates a self-awareness on the part of the protagonists of religious acts—monks—that there is always this side of life that is tempting, that is weird, that is outré, that they either have to resist, or admit that they came from a situation where they were fallen and they indulged in it. But this sense of self-reckoning, where you realise that the world is a world in which one hopes that the centre will hold, but in which the periphery—in which there’s always unbelief and there are always poor people, and challenging disabilities, and other kinds of threats to the idea of God’s perfectly ordered universe—is waiting to encroach and the question is: are they part of your world, or are they something that is utterly abhorrent and must be kept out? The answer is that if they were utterly abhorrent and had to be kept out, they wouldn’t be in the cathedrals or the books at all. But they’re there, which means that they are part of that world and they need to be reckoned with. It’s an answer to the black-and-white, good-and-bad of religious morality and moralising and theology."