Justice in the Margins: Punishment in Medieval Toulouse

"Justice in the Margins: Punishment in Medieval Toulouse." A remarkable sequence of drawings was added to the lower margins of a manuscript containing the Coutumes de Toulouse and its only surviving commentary, written in 1296. Deploying clothed and naked human figures, the drawings are explicit representations of public punishments in force at the time. This illustration cycle is unique for several reasons: it is an unexpected complement to the conventional miniatures at the main text divisions; it bears witness to rarely depicted medieval penal practices; and most enigmatically, the criminal character of this pictorial testimony is entirely at odds with the norms and procedures of municipal administration described in the text. This essay discusses the depicted punishments and the crimes for which they were invoked, setting the images into historical and visual contexts and analyzing what they may reveal about society in thirteenth-century Toulouse. In light of the conjectured identities of the text commentator and the manuscript's patron, the author suggests why the marginal illustrations might have been placed in the manuscript.