Fonctions du profane et du « ridiculum » dans l’enluminure médiévale

Abstract

Recent studies by Randall and Camille have thrown new light on the meaning of the medieval illuminations «at the bottom of the page ». The present article follows on from these studies to look at several examples taken from fourteenth-century religious manuscripts. It attempts to measure how autonomous these illuminations are and to analyse their humour. The first two examples examined act as «visual annotations », offering an ironic reversal of the text to serve as a foreword, a clerical vituperatio. The satire resides in a scene taken from daily life, put in the place of a traditional allegorical representation. Two other examples establish a thematic link between the illustration and the text of a psalm ; representations of loving couples create a relationship between the religious world and the world of profane love. This transposition of verses of the psalm into a profane register opens up an interpretative system of the religious text, based on humour. Another example suggests how to interpret a visual circumlocution based on the distinctio. It is a play on words which reverses the original meaning. The analogies between religious theatre and these «footnote » illustrations confirm our hypothesis on the clerical function in this iconographical tradition. In both fields it is a question of legitimating the ridiculum in the service of the per suas w : the church’s intentions are translated by means of humour and amusement and in a mixture of stylistic registers that medieval literature inherited from late Antiquity.