“When is a monster not a monster? / Oh, when you love it.” –Caitlyn Siehl, “Start Here”
Monstrous Marginalia is a digital humanities project that showcases examples of monsters in medieval marginalia, built by utilizing Wax as a website base for a digital collection. Though Monstrous Marginalia is a small collection, its contents are curated to demonstrate an assortment of monstrous marginalia across a variety of different manuscripts. Dragons, griffins, giants, and more readily come to mind as emblematic of medieval monstrosity. However, these monsters can be understood to represent far more than mere flights of fancy. A monster can be read as a representation of the fears, desires, anxieties, fantasies, and other latent sentiments of the culture that created its body. The monster does not emerge from a vacuum– and the shape of a monster should indicate something about the humans who brought it into existence. The choice to draw a monster in the margin of a manuscript, especially when that monster is not relevant to the text on the parchment, speaks to humanity’s persistent fixation on monstrosity, and begs us to ask: what is it about monsters that has captured the human imagination for centuries?
The collection items in Monstrous Marginalia were sourced from the British Library and the Bodleian Library’s digital collections of medieval manuscripts. The British Library’s Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts was kindly made available under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. The Bodleian Library’s Collection of Western Medieval Manuscripts was kindly made available under a Creative Commons non-commercial license, with attribution (CC-BY-NC 4.0).