Embedded Marginalia in the Psalter and Hours of Humphrey de Bohun (British Library, Egerton MS. 3277)

The phrase 'embedded marginalia' refers to images on the pages of medieval manuscripts that are beyond the text block in both a physical and conceptual sense but integrated nevertheless in the form and meaning of the page as a whole. This study is focused on the many examples of embedded marginalia in the Psalter and Hours of Humphrey de Bohun (British Library, Egerton MS. 3277), a sumptuous manuscript produced in England between c. 1360 and c. 1380 by artists and scribes in the service of Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford, Essex and Northampton, and his descendants. The analysis of the physical and conceptual relationships between all the pictorial and verbal elements on the page is intended to reshape the conventional view of marginalia as belonging entirely to the sphere of the 'other'