Images in the Margins by Margot McIlwain Nishimura (review)

REVIEWS 286 there were modern nation-states, Shakespeare was always already multilingual and international, an incipient global cultural commodity” (137). The conspicuous appearance of such a forward-looking piece at the end of the book leaves this reader wishing the entire book had been more innovative or that it would at least offer some kind of unifying perspective on twenty-five years of Shakespeare criticism. What is lacking in this collection is a reason for recapitulating semi-recent critical history or a reading of that history. The critical survey is interesting, but it is missing an argument. In a way, the update and repositioning of her Merchant chapter, and her decision to leave the Hamlet “note” as is, characterize her strategy for the work as a whole and my chief criticism thereof: she pitches the book as a survey of dominant critical trends, but only in the introduction, where she reframes the articles in such a way that her work anticipates or participates in the cutting edge of literary-critical scholarship . By penning a reflective introduction she has shown that theoretical trends shape Shakespeare studies, but she has not shown how or why or what we ought to do with that knowledge. ALEXANDRA ZOBEL, English, UCLA Margot McIlwain Nishimura, Images in the Margins (Los Angeles: Getty Publications 2009) ix + 96 pp., color ill. In her slim and jewel-like volume entitled Images in the Margins, Margot Nishimura considers the role of marginalia in selected English, French, and Italian manuscripts dating to the thirteenth and fourteenth-centuries. The volume served as the exhibition catalogue for a show on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from 1 September through 8 November 2009. Richly-illustrated color photographs of manuscripts in the exhibition are accompanied by short catalogue entries, brief descriptions, and longer thematic essays. Medieval marginalia, or images located in the margins of medieval books, can be figural, decorative, or a combination of both. In this era, marginal images fill the entire periphery of the text block they surround, and are most often continuations of large illustrated initials within the main text. Sometimes decorations grow directly into the margins from these initials, while at other times marginalia displays imagery that refers metaphorically or symbolically to the text nearby. Marginalia can provide entertaining scenes that parody the text’s message, but it is not necessary—marginalia irrelevant to the main text appear as well. The means by which marginalia illuminate, comment upon, and comically foil the texts they surround, Nishimura notes, are complicated by the fact that most marginalia appear in books designed for use in Christian contexts. Images on the margins of manuscripts can connect the reader both to the text and to “the world beyond the pages of the manuscript,” creating a continuity between the virtual act of reading and the reader’s presence in the real world. Chapter 1, “The Medieval Page,” examines the role of illuminated, inhabited , and historiated initials as sources for marginal imagery. These initials primarily act as visual markers that clarify breaks in the text, but Nishimura argues that they are also the origin of themes and designs in marginalia. The initial letter of a new section of text in a sacramentary or missal, for example, was usually much larger than the surrounding text and more highly decorated. An initial might contain creeping vines that men struggle to walk through, or it REVIEWS 287 might sprout sinewy branches from which men hang to keep from “falling” down the surface of the page (figs. 3 and 4). The ligatures of inhabited initials can grow into brightly colored borders that envelope the text, extending down the left-hand margin into the “header” and “footer” areas (fig. 8). These lengthy ligatures can take the form of attenuated architecture or elongated animals, providing fanciful furniture upon which figures can sit or stand (fig. 7). The “footer” of a page could inspire wide bands of narrative scenes, called bas-depage scenes, extending from the left to right margin. Bas-de-page stories are highly condensed, and can continue from folio to folio, providing a plot line secondary to the central text (figs. 10 and 11). These secondary stories can be either...