Medieval books are full of surprising illuminations. The sacred, serious text of the Gospels and Psalms is not only surrounded by abstract patterns or flower tendrils, but angels, people, animals - and above all mythical creatures, which are often all of these at the same time - can be found everywhere. For the most part, they pursue quite peculiar occupations: Rabbits play instruments, knights fight with oversized snails, head figurines and strange body parts populate the parchment. Seemingly overflowing with the painters' imagination, they were not only ornamental, but also aided memorization: in other words, memorizing the texts, as each page had its very own "face". But didn't this fundamentally change everything: didn't the bizarre world gradually give the pious canonical text new subtexts and strange secondary meanings - and in the end was it still so easy to decide what was main and what was secondary: the text or the images? (Dorothea Hofmann)