ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns the presence of seemingly peripheral figures in narrative representations and the questions of why they are there, what the sources for the iconography might be, and what they might signify in relation to both text and patronage. It focuses on a figure of a little boy who appears in the two illustrated editions of the Homilies of James Kokkinobaphos, Paris gr. 1208 and Vatican gr. 1162.2 The two books contain six homilies based on sequential episodes in the life of the Virgin, composed in the first half of the twelfth century by a monk named James or Jacob from the Kokkinobaphos monastery.
