The shield: Prowess, cowardice, and parody of absence. The Bodley manuscript 264
Type de matériel :
75
The richness of the marginalia accompanying the text of the Roman d’Alexandre in the ms. Bodley 264 demonstrates “the possible reversibility of the center and the margins”, in the words of I. Fabry-Tehranchi. This article analyzes the treatment of the shield and the coat of arms it bears in these drolleries, which compete with the central iconography of the manuscript, depicting the blossoming of the seigneurial world in the fourteenth century. On the one hand, there is a profusion of imaginary coats of arms with positive or negative connotations. On the other hand, there is a parodic register that uses either the shield without heraldic devices, or the anthropomorphic shield, whose meanings are similar to those found in the topos of the fight between the knight and the snail, a recurrent theme at the time. In Bodley 264, the coat of arms, as a mirror of seigneurial identity, escapes the derision that these representations in the margins sometimes express, even as they magnify and align with the central iconography.
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