Ghent Psalter-Hours, f. 193r: dancing apes

Psalter-Hours, Ghent region, about 1315 to 1325, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Ms. W.82, folio 193r. Three apes link hands and swing into a ring dance on a strip of grass, heads thrown back, one waving what looks like a cloth. Apes were the margins' favorite mimics, copying human manners to make them look silly, and this book uses them more than once: elsewhere in it, on folio 31r, an ape rides a unicorn. Here they get a close-up from the museum's own detail photography.