11/27/2023 0 Comments Illuminated manuscript sea monster![]() ![]() The second marginal image depicts the wholly fictional creature, the web-footed sciopod, a tiny one-footed beast which could use its large foot as an umbrella. Manuscripts often show music being performed in many different scenarios, from the entertainment at banquets to a crucial part of religious prayer at funerals. In this image we can see a selection of common medieval musical instruments including the organ and the hurdy-gurdy, a string instrument. Alongside the Psalms, the text contains images of men, women, animals, hybrids, dragons as well as scenes of daily life – albeit often influenced by Bestiaries. What is particularly striking about the manuscript, however, is the marginalia. Alongside the Psalms, the book contains a number of illustrations, full-page and partial-page miniatures, and historiated and illuminated initials. The Rutland Psalter / The Rutland Psalter was produced c. ![]() In the 1st century A.D., Pliny the Elder described extraordinary races of humans living in India and Ethiopia: these included mouthless hairy creatures called Astomi, who had no need of food or drink men with dog’s heads and one-legged creatures who could hop at incredible speed and use their giant feet as umbrellas to protect them from the sun. Numerous documents from antiquity tell of monstrous people living at the edge of the known world. As manifestations of the devil, dragons were a common enemy of the saints, perhaps the most famous of whom is St George, a warrior saint often depicted slaying a dragon. Miniature of a red dragon, from Peraldus’s theological miscellany / The dragon is often associated with the devil and crucially appears in the final, apocalyptic book of the Bible, the Revelation of St John. Alixe Bovey delves into the symbolic meaning of a variety of monsters to understand what they can teach us about life and belief in the Middle Ages. Men with dogs’ heads, creatures with giant feet, griffins, sirens and hellish demons can all be found in the illustrated pages of medieval manuscripts.
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