Back when books were written by hand it was common for the scribe to decorate the margins with designs and drawings. One common trope was illustrations of Knights battling snails. Is there any indication why this was or what it meant?

[u/BoosherCacow]

I was over at /r/HistoryMemes reading this post and learned about this. Someone over there that nobody has any idea why it was such a common subject.

Is there any school of thought on why snails were used? Was it a meme from antiquity or a joke? Or could there have been some some deeper meaning?

Example one Example two

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[u/jschooltiger]

We don’t know.

[u/BoosherCacow → u/jschooltiger]

Why in the name of all that is holy did that not come up when I searched? You would think reddit's search could handle even that. Thank you very much.

edit: I checked my history and figured out that as per usual it was my fault, not the search function. I searched for "snial". Apologies, Reddit search function.

[u/jschooltiger → u/BoosherCacow]

The snails answer has its own history here. It gets asked a lot by karma farming bots, and got linked at least once by Ars or one of those link farm sites (“AskHistorians even knows why there were so many medieval snail illustrations!” Except, of course, we don’t.)

[u/BoosherCacow → u/jschooltiger]

No kidding! I had no idea. I've been lurking for years and have either never seen it or my mental decline is more precipitous than I thought.

[u/MoraleHole → u/BoosherCacow]

And by adding "snial" to the index, you have saved someone else the same fate.

[u/BoosherCacow → u/MoraleHole]

I am glad to have done some good in my world today!

[u/CitizenPremier → u/jschooltiger]

Is it really too much of a stretch for historians to say "because it's funny?" Will historians of the year 2500 struggle to interpret The Far Side because they don't want to admit it's funny?

I'm not trying to editorialize, I really don't know how historians decide to interpret something as humorous, and I'm sure there's interesting debate about it.

[u/JohnPaul_River → u/CitizenPremier]

Historians aren't acting oblivious about it being funny, they know it is and the linked answer says that explicitly. What they wonder is why exactly were snails, specifically, chosen so many times over and over again. We like to think that humour is random, but it's really, really not, that's why it ages rapidly. We know it could be a joke, but we're not in on the joke. And it could also not be a joke, but a reference to something we don't know. Like, maybe there was a popular song about knights fighting snails and no one ever wrote it down, who knows.

[u/jschooltiger → u/CitizenPremier]

If you click on the link and read the comment there, you will find the answer to your question.

[u/Microwaved-toffee271 → u/CitizenPremier]

Everyone knows it’s a joke. The point is that we don’t know what the joke is. Was there a funny story about this? A song? We don’t have that information.

[u/bob-loblaw-esq → u/jschooltiger]

Memes have always been a thing.

[u/jschooltiger → u/bob-loblaw-esq]

No, they really haven’t. And it’s not useful to us to imagine the past in modern terms.

[u/bob-loblaw-esq → u/jschooltiger]

You seem to think I mean in the contemporary sense, but I mean in the mimetic sense. An idea, like a virus, if engaging enough, is replicated by other humans. As a sociologist, it’s actually an important feature of human social growth and part of what makes imagined communities cohesive.

[u/gerardmenfin]

Indeed, nobody knows for sure like u/jschooltiger says. I'll repost a relatively recent take on the topic (2021) by medievalist Valérie Toureille. She's not quite convinced by the "Lombard hypothesis" (ie that it was a visual pun with "Landsknecht" mercenaries being called "Landschnecke", Land Snails) and warns about "overinterpretation" of medieval iconography, where "symbols are often ambiguous and sometimes contradictory". She notes that many of these documents were commissioned by women and drawn by lower-class clerics, and she speculates that this type of humour, only slightly transgressive, was meant to mock chivalry ideals, and reflected "the immoderate taste of medieval people for both wordplay and derision."

I would rather think that it was the initiative of women, who in their commissions could give free rein to their facetiousness. Let us not forget that most of the psalters we have today were owned or commissioned by women. Why should they not have allowed themselves a little humour and derision in the rough world of the knights, in the face of the brutality of the men of the aristocracy. They could thus take revenge for the coarseness of their husbands: a comfort in the margins of their existence. This feminine humour could easily resonate with the resentment of the cadets, the copyists or illuminators that the misfortune of their birth placed, often against their will, in the ranks of the Church or on the benches of the scriptoria. Clerics who have fun at their leisure, to the detriment of their elders, by highlighting their cowardice in the face of the horrible and repulsive beast.

• Toureille, Valerie. ‘Duels Dérisoires- Chevaliers et Escargots Dans Les Marginalia’. Publications Du Centre Européen d’études Bourguignonnes, 2021. https://hal.science/hal-03530208.

[u/Environmental_Suit36 → u/gerardmenfin]

Her take sounds exactly like an overinterpretation.

[u/PantShittinglyHonest → u/gerardmenfin]

That's quite the modern-sensibility tinged leap of logic for someone who cautions against overinterpretation.

[u/platypodus → u/gerardmenfin]

Couldn't they just as easily be stand-in for evil, since they're "horned" like the devil?

[u/AceOfGargoyes17 → u/platypodus]

The descriptions of snails in medieval bestiaries that I've seen don't make this comparison, which makes me think that snails probably weren't commonly seen as a metaphor for evil.