Margins
The geometric marginal designs contain a gold background with geometric blocks of red and blue. The red and blue areas can be a variety of shapes, including concentric circles, waves, double helices, triangles, parallelograms, etc. They contain acanthus leaves, and the portion with gold background includes flowers and the remnants of rinceaux. The dominant colors of the flowers are green, red, and blue, with white or gold decorative lines.
Tracing:
Many of the margins are decorated with geometric patterns. On these leaves, instead of creating new decorations, the margins have been traced from the other side and duplicated to create a mirror image. The use of tracing decorations has not been researched thoroughly but is still an interesting aspect to take note of when studying the overall decoration.
Botanical:
In addition to the geometric marginal decorations, some pages have a botanical theme. Often a botanical page is on the same leaf as a geometric leaf which indicates that they were made at the same time, though not necessarily by the same artist, for this manuscript. The margins are made up mostly of red or blue flowers on long, delicate, green stems with green and yellow leaves with one or two acanthus leaves in blue, red, and yellow. Small gold dots surrounded by small black marks fill in the spaces between vines and leaves.
The use of realistic flowers during the period when this manuscript was made are what help us determine that its place of origin is most likely somewhere in Northern France or the Netherlands. The trademark of the Dutch golden age of manuscript art in the seventeenth century was trompe l’oeil, depicting plants, objects, and whole scenes as realistically as possible. These simple, but recognizable, flowers are a probably a precursor to that technique.
A few of these botanical margins also contain miniature grotesques. This leaf depicts a woman, possibly St. Margaret, in prayer while emerging from the body of a monster.