[MR] Romance Through the Ages

[Bertran]

  Sent to you by Bertran via Google Reader: Romance Through the Ages via
Got Medieval by noreply at blogger.com (Got Medieval) on 8/9/10
This week's marginal medieval image is found in the lower margin of a
page in Bodleian Library MS Bodl. 264, the mid-fourteenth-century
edition of the Romance of Alexander that I've featured here quite a
bit:*

To each side of a pair of birds the illuminator has given us a pair of
lovers meant to demonstrate that old proverb, "Life ain't nothing
but..."--er, I mean "The more you love someone, the more..."--er, that
is, the old truism, "Women! Can't live with'em, can't... something
something." OK, I admit it, I've got no clue what's going on. You tell
me.

The couple on the left consists of a homely and/or older lady giving
her heart (represented as the actual organ, though without any blood)
to a young man who looks like he just smelled something funky:

The couple on the right is composed instead of an eager older man
offering a full money purse and a young woman who rejects him:

Will nothing satisfy you young people? You reject an old man's money
AND an older woman's offer of a heart she ripped still-beating from the
chest of her husband whose sleeves were no where near as fashionable as
yours? Really, there's just no pleasing some people.

A nice thing about this particular MS 264 artist (several worked on the
manuscript) is the attention he gives to faces. Here, he gives both the
unrequiting youngsters the same disinterested nostril flare and pursed
lips of disapproval that seem to say, "Ah, yes, your little gift,
how... nice.":


--

*How many times can I dip into the same well? Well, there's over 500
pages in that particular manuscript, and nearly every one has
something** on it.
**Though most of those somethings are birds, and once you've seen five
or six marginal birds you've seen them all. Still, there's about 100
fully-illuminated pages with multiple marginal elements per page, so if
I wanted I could just open a MS Bodl. 264 blog and I'd have posts for
years.***
***Though as I said, they'd mostly be bird posts. People like birds,
right?


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