If you've ever seen a page of the Luttrell Psalter (c. 1320-ish, English) you've seen something the art history textbooks usually skip over: the main text is a perfectly solemn devotional psalm, and running down the margin is a snail in full armor jousting a rabbit on horseback. This is the best thing in art history and almost no one talks about it.
What marginalia actually was
In the 13th-15th centuries, skilled manuscript illuminators — monks, mostly, though also professional laypeople in commercial scriptoria — spent years filling in the margins of sacred and secular texts with whatever they felt like. The center of the page was dead serious. The margins were where the joke lived.
And the jokes are specific:
- Jousting snails. No one fully knows why snails appear so often in medieval margins, often in combat. Theories range from cowardice metaphors to social commentary on the Lombards. It's probably just that snails in armor are funny.
- Killer rabbits. Monty Python didn't invent the killer rabbit — it's straight from the margins of medieval books of hours. Rabbits beheading knights, rabbits wielding trumpets, rabbits doing crimes.
- Butt trumpets. Pages and pages of it. You can google "medieval butt trumpet" and get thousands of real, attested manuscript examples.
- Animals doing human jobs. Cats playing lutes. Rabbits performing surgery. Foxes preaching to geese.
Why it still lands
Because it's the same joke that makes memes work now: a radical shift in register between the serious and the absurd. The psalm is about redemption; the margin has a dog in a bishop's hat. That's not just funny — it's modern funny. It's the internet in 1320.
At Canvas & Click
The Castle Culture collection at Canvas & Click is built on this exact aesthetic: original art rendered in the style of illuminated manuscripts, featuring jousting snails, lute-playing cats, motivational plague doctors, and dragons guarding laptops. The craft is sincere; the punchline is in the margin.