Weird Medieval Manuscript Marginalia

Medieval painters filled the edges of psalters, prayer books and even law books with scenes that have nothing to do with the text beside them: rabbits hunting hunters, men squaring up to snails, apes acting like people and creatures assembled from spare parts. Each photo here shows one of those marginal scenes and names the manuscript, the library that keeps it and the folio where that is documented. The test for a place is simple: the picture sits in the margin rather than the main miniature, and it is genuinely odd. The gallery runs roughly in date order, from an English psalter of about 1260 to a book of hours that a king of Navarre probably bought around 1405. The great illuminated manuscripts as whole books have their own separate gallery.