From that original caricature, snails and knights became a trope in medieval marginal art.Īs the video shows, medieval marginal art was an unusual playground for surreal and fantastic drawings. Randall theorizes that these snails began as representation of the Lombards, a maligned group that rose to prominence as lenders in the late 1200s. The most convincing argument comes from medieval scholar Lillian Randall’s 1962 essay “The Snail in Gothic Marginal Warfare” (an argument echoed in Michael Camille’s book about marginal art, available here). But even though it seems like there’s no possible explanation for all that knight-on-snail combat, the above video shows some of the top theories. Developers at Yaza Games have explicitly compared these marginalia illustrations to modern-day internet memes, being catchy images and concepts shared between makers of literature to inject levity and humor into their daily lives.At first, it’s a completely mystifying image: Why do medieval manuscripts show knights fighting snails? These marginal illustrations are surprisingly common (you can peruse a few colorful, snail-filled examples courtesy of Yale’s library and the British Library).
Other figures are more bizarre and fantastical, in an Alice In Wonderland sense: sword-wielding dogs, cat bishops, and archer rabbits walking on two legs, along with jousting snails and trumpeters who blow with their rears.īelieve it or not, the bizarre units in Inkulinati (and in the illustrated interludes of Monty Python And The Holy Grail) are largely based on real-life illustrations sketched by those bored medieval scribes, who would scribble oddities such as walking animals, knights jousting snails, grotesque devil figures, and, of course, butt-trumpeters. Some of these living illustrations are familiar figures from the middle ages: knights, kings, queens, nuns, monks, and peasants. The premise of Inkulinati is that a pair of medieval calligraphers are fighting each other in a game of artistic strategy, using a magical form of ink to bring cartoon characters to life on a blank manuscript and then make them battle each other to the death. They would also draw bizarre images of people, animals, and plants in these margins, quirky, cartoonish characters that the combat units and characters of Inkulinati are closely modeled after. According to the Ancient History Encyclopedia, many of these priest-scribes, forbidden to speak during their shifts, would seek to escape their tedium by doodling humorously honest comments in the margins of their manuscripts - frequently complaints about their supervisors, sore fingers, and the quality of their quills, inks, and vellum. The process of "illuminating" a medieval manuscript was very grueling: absent the advantages of automated machinery and electric lightning, many "scriptores" were forced to work from sunup to sundown, utilizing as many hour of natural sunlight as they could to write legible characters. Related: Demon's Souls Most Obscure Weapons (And Their Real Life Medieval Equivalents) And marginalia provide layers of information as to. The resulting books, many of which have lasted for hundreds of years without falling apart, are the texts known as illuminated manuscripts. Manuscripts can be seen as time capsules, says Johanna Green, Lecturer in Book History and Digital Humanities at the University of Glasgow.
The majority of manuscripts in medieval times were created in the scriptoriums of medieval monasteries, whose monks bound together sheets of vellum parchment into thick volumes, then filled up the blank pages with intricate calligraphy and colorfully inked illustrations. Before the creation of printing presses, European manuscripts like the Book of Kells or the Lindisfarne Gospels were luxury items, expensive status symbols that took lots of time and effort to create.
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