AN EXERCISE IN EXTRAVAGANCE AND ABUNDANCE: SOME THOUGHTS ON THE MARGINALIA DECORATA IN THE CODEX PARISINUS GRAECUS 216 KALLIRROE LINARDOU M edieval manuscripts without illustrations or illumination rarely attract the attention of art-historians. Tey are the privileged domain of palaeographers and philologists, and by and large are valued according to the quality of the text they contain and preserve. Many of the standard editions of medieval texts that scholars work with go back to the nineteenth century or even earlier, when it was common practice to combine texts from multiple medieval manuscripts in order to come up with a version that was deemed free of ‘contamination’; this, however, produces an artifcial and sterile text that does not actually exist in any medieval document. 1 But what about such medieval manuscripts as material testimonies? Viewing a manuscript is actually important not just for accessing medieval versions of texts but also for seeing how written texts were staged, how they were presented, how they visually engaged with their reader/viewer. Teir materiality, which inevitably interferes with their performative qualities, contributes to their meaning and the meaning of the texts they contain. Tat materiality includes elements such as the mise en page, the selection of texts, the aesthetic qualities of a text in the light of its material context and so on. My focus here is on precisely this ‘stagecraf’ genius of named and anonymous scribes, as well as on the visual manipulation of the script, and how such mechanisms were employed in order to articulate eloquent messages and to convey profound meaning. Te constant fascination of anonymous artisans and named artists with the 1 On such scholarly considerations and discussion see: T. Snijders, ‘Work, Version, Text and Scriptum: High Medieval Manuscript Terminology in the Afermath of the New Philology’, Digital Philology, 2.2 (Fall 2013), 266–96, esp. p. 274. See also the special issue of Speculum, 65.1 (1990), dedicated to New Philology and especially S. G. Nichols, ‘Introduction: Philology in a Manuscript Culture’, pp. 1–10. 12 C12 GDevices Chap12 A.indd 218 20/07/2017 16:52