Even more so than before, the decoration style in this chapter blends decorative shapes with functionality. Although it may appear peculiar at first, this chapter is driven by speech. Books are generally quiet objects, apart from the rustling of their leaves as you flip them. The fact that the book is a silent medium (besides audio-and e-books) implies that sound embedded in a text is not heard but read. Generally, this was no problem, except that in book illustrations it was sometimes necessary to indicate that certain words were uttered by certain people. How to show that it concerned direct speech? And how to indicate who said what? Decorators employed an all-too-familiar strategy to deal with these issues: they used speech bubbles. This chapter examines the different ways in which speech was visualized in medieval decoration. As is shown here, they take on different appearances, some of which show a striking resemblance to those encountered in our modern comic books.

Dialogues

The British Library owns a ca. 1300 copy of Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda aurea, the most popular collection of saints’ lives from the later Middle Ages (Stowe 49). The manuscript contains a number of marginal drawings in which the characters are shown talking. In one of them we see a group of people strolling, some of them with a walking stick in their hand (Figure 57). You can almost hear their sing-songs in the background. Curiously, we are looking at a group of travellers conversing in English. What is perhaps even more remarkable is that the words they speak are written out and connected to the mouths of the persons that utter them. In other words, as in modern comic books, there is a visual connection between words on the page and the fictional person that speaks them. Also paralleling modern comic books, the story that unfolds in the Stowe manuscript is funny and familiar.

The following conversation may be overheard. The figure on the left starts with a strange mantra: “They die because of heat, they die because of heat.”