A drollerie, often also called a

grotesque Since at least the 18th century (in French and German as well as English), grotesque has come to be used as a general adjective for the strange, mysterious, magnificent, fantastic, hideous, ugly, incongruous, unpleasant, or disgusting, and thus ...

, from French language, is a small decorative image in the

margin Margin may refer to: Physical or graphical edges * Margin (typography), the white space that surrounds the content of a page *Continental margin, the zone of the ocean floor that separates the thin oceanic crust from thick continental crust *Leaf ...

of an

illuminated manuscript An illuminated manuscript is a formally prepared document where the text is often supplemented with flourishes such as borders and miniature illustrations. Often used in the Roman Catholic Church for prayers, liturgical services and psalms, th ...

, most popular from about 1250 through the 15th century, though found earlier and later. The most common types of drollery images appear as mixed creatures, either between different animals, or between animals and human beings, or even between animals and plants or inorganic things. Examples include cocks with human heads, dogs carrying human masks, archers winding out of a fish's mouth, bird-like dragons with an elephant's head on the back. Often they have a thematic connection with the subject of the text of the page, and larger miniatures, and they usually form part of a wider scheme of decorated margins, though some are effectively doodles added later. One manuscript, '' The Croy Hours'', has so many it has become known as ''The Book of Drolleries''. Another manuscript that contains many drolleries is the English Luttrell Psalter, which has hybrid creatures and other monsters on a great deal of the pages. This comes from the

East Anglia East Anglia is an area in the East of England, often defined as including the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. The name derives from the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of the East Angles, a people whose name originated in Anglia, in ...

n school of illumination, which was especially fond of adding drolleries. The Taymouth Hours,

Gorleston Psalter The Gorleston Psalter (British Library Add MS 49622) is a 14th-century manuscript notable for containing early music instruction and for its humorous marginalia. It is named for the town of Gorleston in Norfolk. Description The Gorleston ...

, and Smithfield Decretals are other examples; all four are 14th-century and now in the

British Library The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the Briti ...

. In the Taymouth Hours the images are inside the main frame given each page, and so are strictly ''bas de page'' images rather than being "marginal". The images mix sacred subjects relevant to the text with secular ones that are not. Such images are the most plentiful sources of contemporary illustrations of ordinary life in the period, and many are often seen reproduced in modern books.Rickert, 145, 148-149 In English, "drollerie" was also a term in the 18th century for

genre painting Genre painting (or petit genre), a form of genre art, depicts aspects of everyday life by portraying ordinary people engaged in common activities. One common definition of a genre scene is that it shows figures to whom no identity can be attache ...

s of low-life subjects, especially those in

Dutch Golden Age painting Dutch Golden Age painting is the painting of the Dutch Golden Age, a period in Dutch history roughly spanning the 17th century, during and after the later part of the Eighty Years' War (1568–1648) for Dutch independence. The new Dutch Republ ...

, which indeed are to some extent descended from the medieval marginal images.

References

*Rickert, Margaret, ''Painting in Britain: The Middle Ages'', Penguin History of Art (now Yale), 1954 *

Michelle P. Brown Michelle P. Brown is Professor Emerita of Medieval Manuscript Studies at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. She was previously (1986–2004) Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library. She has been a historical c ...

(1994), ''Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts: A Guide to Technical Terms'', Iconography of illuminated manuscripts Book design Fictional human–animal hybrids Animals in art {{manuscript-art-stub