Name: 中世美術で騎士がカタツムリと戦った理由 (Why knights fought snails in medieval art)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T07:57:22.000Z
Duration: 4 min 37 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

We've all been there: after a long day at
work, you sit down and binge-read some Arthurian

They're called “illuminated manuscripts”
- because they're illuminated with illustrations

colorful drawings,
and very … special doodles in the margins.

But among all those steroidal rabbits
and this hooded person laying literal eggs,

A lot of medieval knights in these manuscripts
are...fighting snails.

The largest snail alive is 15.5 inches, snout
to tail.

So why does this knight look like he's in
for the fight of his life?

Illuminated manuscripts were handwritten.

Scribes painstakingly transcribed the same
bibles, devotionals, and stories.

By the 1960s, one scholar thought those margins
were worth attention.

Lillian Randall
was particularly intrigued by “The Snail

She developed a theory about why a book like
this might include a winged knight fleeing

And why it showed up again and again and again.

Randall found more than 70 snail-fighting
heroes in just 29 manuscripts,

most of which were made between 1290 and 1310.

Pray that the snail will kill you quickly.

Sometimes the margins riffed on the text,
sometimes they were disconnected.

But Randall connected them to historical stereotypes.

The biggest was that the “Lombards” were
greedy, mean, and cowardly.

The Lombards were a Germanic people that had
invaded Italy.

But in 772, they were
badly beaten by Charlemagne.

That permanently stained their reputation.

By the late 1200s — when those snail pictures
started getting popular — the Lombards had

become lenders and pawnbrokers spread throughout
Europe.

They didn't have full rights, they couldn't
even own arms.

That combination of power and impotence, Randall
argued, made them targets.

Snails carried their houses on their backs
as they retreated, just as the Lombards had

They were slimy, like a lot of Europeans probably
saw their lenders.

Calling Lombards snails was an anti-foreign
slur

It appeared in what was probably a medieval
pattern book, with models that helped other

And snails showed up in many different combinations
later on.

Here's a snail/monkey/rabbit battle royale
from the 1400s.

We can't be certain what the knights and
snails meant because they meant different

The same way people don't explain their
memes today, scribes didn't annotate their

Randall's argument fits with the timing
and history.

But people also speculate that snails represented
the slowness of time, or the insulation of

The snails reveal something, along with everything
else in the margins.

As scribes labored over transcriptions of
hallowed works, reproducing every line,

they snuck in additions, jokes, and riffs,
in the margins of the text.

But they were made by artists who sought to
parody the indignities and absurdities of

So they turned them into a self-portrait.

He's just going to get murdered by a snail.

So this video just scratches the surface when
it comes to weird medieval art and possible

Michael Camille wrote a whole book about art
in the margins and he highlights one figure:

it's the gryllus, and he's supposed to
represent bodily appetites.