Image on the Edge

What do they all mean - the lascivious ape, autophagic dragons, pot-bellied heads, harp-playing asses, arse-kissing priests and somersaulting jongleurs to be found protruding from the edges of medieval buildings and in the margins of illuminated manuscripts? Now available in a new hardback edition, Michael Camille's Image on the Edge explores that riotous realm of marginal art, so often explained away as mere decoration or zany doodles, where resistance to social constraints flourished.

Medieval image-makers focused attention on the underside of society, the excluded and the ejected. Peasants, servants, prostitutes and beggars all found their place, along with knights and clerics, engaged in impudent antics in the margins of prayer-books or, as gargoyles, on the outsides of churches. Camille brings us to an understanding of how marginality functioned in medieval culture and shows us just how scandalous, subversive and amazing the art of the time could be.

'A handsome, entertaining account of the peculiar fashion for grotesque, obscene and humorous presences on the margins of medieval illuminated manuscripts.' - Times Higher Education

'If the study of medieval art is not to remain an esoteric and elitist discipline then more books like this must be written.' - Burlington Magazine

'Camille's polymathic essays undoubtedly will provoke such studies and will expand the field of questions we ask ... and in this he will have made a valuable contribution.' - Oxford Art Journal