A drollery, often also called a grotesque, 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 manuscript, document where the text is decorated with flourishes such as marginalia, borders and Miniature (illuminated manuscript), miniature illustrations. Often used in the Roman Catholic Churc ...

, 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

doodle A doodle is a drawing made while a person's attention is otherwise occupied. Doodles are simple drawings that can have concrete representational meaning or may just be composed of random and abstract art, abstract lines or shapes, generally w ...

s added later. The word comes from the French ''drôlerie'', meaning a joke. 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 The Luttrell Psalter (British Library, Add MS 42130) is an illuminated manuscript, illuminated psalter commissioned by Sir Geoffrey Luttrell (1276–1345), lord of the manor of Irnham in Lincolnshire, written and illustrated on parchment ''circa'' ...

, 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 of the East of England, often defined as including the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, with parts of Essex sometimes also included. The name derives from the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of the East Angles, ...

n school of illumination, which was especially fond of adding drolleries. The Taymouth Hours, Gorleston Psalter, 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. Based in London, it is one of the largest libraries in the world, with an estimated collection of between 170 and 200 million items from multiple countries. As a legal deposit li ...

. 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. In English, "drollerie" was also a term in the 18th century for

genre painting Genre painting (or petit genre) is the painting of genre art, which 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 ca ...

s of low-life subjects, especially those in Dutch Golden Age painting, which indeed are to some extent descended from the medieval marginal images.

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