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I can't escape from the similarity the snail vs knight imagery bears to the knight vs serpent.
'Snake' and 'snail' have the same proto-Indo European root; '*sneg' - meaning 'crawling or creeping thing' . "The word snail essentially is a diminutive form of Old English snaca "snake,"
(http://www.etymonline.com)
The difference with the marginal imagery seems to be the perceivable weaker position of the knights, who in serpent legends are generally victorious.
The serpent has been said to represent a number of things - the heathen religion, female sexuality, the yin, the subterranean/unseen, earth energy, etc. Perhaps the symbol was originally a coded heathen statement testifying 'the serpent' had not completely overwhelmed?
Knight v Snail
Recently a group of us went into our manuscripts store to have a look at some medieval genealogical rolls. We were examining Royal MS 14 B V, an English roll from the last part of the 13th century that contains quite a lot of marginalia, when one of our post-medieval colleagues noticed a painti...
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Oct 24, 2013
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