Lewis Carroll's imaginative approach to the misericords of Ripon Cathedral may at first appear to have little bearing upon the readings that have been posited throughout the present volume. However, just as Carroll could appropriate these images for his own creative purposes within a few years of Wildridge's assertion concerning their near neighbours in Beverley Minster that they are ‘the most important and instructive of [medieval ecclesiastical] ornaments’ – and, indeed, contemporary creative writers may use choir stall carvings as a stimulus at the same time as medievalists assay their original signification – so it is perhaps unwise to assume a singularity of meaning for the original audience. We have seen throughout that the carvings on misericords – whether of naturalistic flora or fanciful fauna, of devout piety or brazen sexuality – belong to a complex web of symbol and allusion that threads its way throughout late medieval culture, both connecting and, at the same time, blurring the distinctions between the sacred and the profane. The literature of popular entertainment, from heroic romances of Alexander to the amoral wiles of Reynard (or Russell) could be employed in order to make serious points concerning pride or resistance to temptation, just as Caesarius of Heisterbach could focus flagging attention by invoking King Arthur before moving on to serious matters of devotion. Likewise, the bawdy physicality that we expect from the fabliau could be employed in order to figure the ‘natural’ order of masculine ecclesiastical superiority as well as to provide an admonishment against the temptations of the flesh. This latter can be further articulated by the seductive hybrid of the mermaid, whilst other hybrids may signify anything from the infinite variety of God's creation to the ‘secret and distant freaks’ in which nature indulges herself in the remote areas of the Christian world. And, as we saw in chapter 3, without clear explanation and close supervision, misinterpretation was a very real possibility even during the late medieval period in which the carvings were made.

When the modern scholar looks to the margins, there is a temptation to view them solely as the habitation of ‘ejected forms’, a refuge for that which is cast out from the centre – a centre which in the later Middle Ages was explicitly Christian.