Snails are obviously an unworthy foe for a brave knight, and Elizabeth Moore Hunt has suggested that “the natural baseness of the animal makes it unworthy prey for splendid jousting gear and thus a humorous parody of the knight in arms”.
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Often in the pictures, the knights are shown as losing or cowering in terror. Rather than showing the brave knights fighting off an evil foe such as the Lombards, there is an idea that the snails vs knights motif is a humorous satire on the knightly class and the idea of chivalry. This time the snails are being ridden by naked jousters ( Lectura super Institutionibus, France, 1480 – 1481). However, many have questioned this theory, as explained by the British Library: this “does not explain why the knight is often depicted on the losing end of this battle, or why this particular image became so popular in the margins of non-historical texts such as Psalters or Books of Hours”.
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Placing them in marginalia serves as some xenophobic fun, and would account for why they are frequently shown fighting chivalrous knights – a sort of ‘good ideals vs bad ideals’. 13 th century), the Lombards were an unpopular group in Europe, with the view that they monopolised jobs, lent money at unreasonable rates, and were overall a treasonous, sinning, un-chivalrous bunch. By the time that the snail marginalia start to become frequent (c. Historian Lilian Randall has suggested that the snails represent the Lombards, a Germanic people who ruled most of the Italian Peninsula from 568 to 774 AD. This leads to the suggestion that the valorous knights are fighting the “wicked” who will eventually meet their just punishment. This is discussing the punishment of the wicked, saying “let them be like a snail which melts away as it goes, Like a stillborn child of a woman, that they may not see the sun”. This led Comte to theorise that the snails must represent the Resurrection – the two images must be linked.Īnother suggestion tied to death comes from medievalist Lisa Spangenberg, who highlights another Biblical connection – Psalm 58. He noticed that in two manuscripts there were marginal snails very close to miniatures of the Raising of Lazarus (for those not aware, this is a Biblical story where Jesus brings Lazarus of Bethany back to life four days after his burial). One of the first people to pick up on the strange addition of snails to manuscripts was Comte de Bastard in 1850. 1) The snails represent death/the Resurrection Speed was also a motivation: the paste-over allowed the book to keep pace with events in a manner faster than making a whole new book.Knight with a club fighting against a huge snail (Smithfield Decretals, southern France, c. The motivations for issuing this new article were clearly political (expunge Beria!) and economic (do it cheaply!).
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Rather than reprint the entire encyclopedia, which would have cost time and resources, the Soviets instead found a cheaper solution: to write an addendum page-an extended article about the Bering Strait-and then send it to all registered owners of the volumes, with instructions that they should paste the new page over the Beria article, thereby obfuscating it. This meant that the article had to be amended. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, issued since 1926, had a positive article on Beria that was now an embarrassment. Stalin had just died, and Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, the chief of Stalin’s secret police, had fallen out of favor. In response to an event in the Soviet Union in 1953 George Orwell wrote, “He who controls the present controls the past, and he who controls the past controls the future.” He was referring to an incident that involved a strategic adjustment to a book.