ABSTRACT
Living as they did, at the edge of the inhabitable world, the medieval English were very concerned with limits and boundaries. Their texts and images demonstrate a focus not only on the borders of the earth, of towns, even of individual bodies, but also on the borders of images and pages, which would result in the eventual English efflorescence of visual marginalia. Now, at the final boundary of this text, one frame seems of particular significance. On folio 14r of the Hexateuch—one of the most significant works to survive the Anglo-Saxon period, with approximately 400 images and “one of the first extended projects of translation of the Bible in a European vernacular” 1 —we find an image of Noah's Ark. (Fig. 1) Above, God explains to Noah the specifications of the ark. It must be three hundred cubits long, fifty wide and thirty high, with a window at the apex and a door and three decks, all of which are clearly present in the image, below. 2
