LUTTRELL DEMON
"The lively, vibrant and sometimes humorous illustrations also include, rather bizarrely, a number of ‘grotesques’, curious figures combining animal and human parts."
Ellen Castelow, Historic UK
*This demon is inspired by the marginalia in the Luttrell Psalter (1320–1340)
The Luttrell Psalter, a book of psalms, was commissioned by the lord of Irnham, Sir Geoffrey Lutrell. Pslaters of this type are filled with marginalia, some meaningful and others, less so. Here's a quote from an Atlas Obscura article by Anika Burgess:
"'The margins are full of images of disembodied body parts, plants, animals, even portraits of cross-eyed kings, which relate to the main body of text and act as a mnemonic for the reader,' Greene says. 'Even though you open the manuscript knowing it is a medical text designed for practical use, nothing quite prepares you for seeing a disembodied leg, posterior, or penis pointing at salient parts of the text!' In Arderne’s texts the marginalia has a clear purpose, but in other manuscripts the meaning of the drawings can be indecipherable. There are countless examples of unusual marginalia—monkeys playing the bagpipes, centaurs, knights in combat with snails, naked bishops, and strange human-animal hybrids that seem to defy categorization."
This guy seems like the latter. A real hybrid that defies categorization. While most people categorize this thing as a "grotesque", it does share a lot of the characteristics of medieval/renaissance demons; hybridization, faces in weird places, skulls. Which is another point I diverge on. I've seen this thing called a monkey but it seems like a skull to me. A poorly drawn skull, but clearly a skull.
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