Oltrepassare il limite: i bas-de-pages del ms. BNF fr. 25526

The ms. fr. 25526, preserved at the BnF in Paris, is a small to medium-sized membranous codex (163 sheets measuring 255 × 180 mm) with an excellent iconographic apparatus. By far the most interesting component of the figurative programme, however, is the series of vignettes that adorn the bas-de-pages, with the exception of the one on the final sheet, animating them with lively scenes of a wide variety of types: From hunting to tournaments, from religious episodes taken from the Gospels and from a wide hagiographic repertoire to moments of everyday life, from play to war, and then common animals, others with anthropomorphic appearance or attitudes, monsters and the usual, bizarre drôleries that must have amused the illuminators even before the readers. Also not excluded are scatological, erotic and obscene themes, the latter concentrated exclusively in the part in which Jean de Meun's suite beginning on f. 31v is transcribed.