BOOK REVIEW : Marginal Mayhem Around Lofty Words : IMAGE ON THE EDGE; The Margins of Medieval Art,<i> by Michael Camille</i> ; Harvard University Press $35; 176 pages

Suppose that Supreme Court decisions were issued simply as majority rulings, a single authoritative opinion with no dissenting arguments. And suppose that, printed in the margins, there were drawings of apes in judicial robes cavorting and gesturing obscenely at the text.

That would be a rough modern equivalent for the kind of transitional and divided mentality that Michael Camille finds in his sprightly and suggestive study of late Medieval illuminated manuscripts.

In the center of the pages in a book of devotions or a courtly romance would stand the text and an illumination depicting some lofty religious or knightly episode. In the margins there were angels or knights, to be sure; but there were also apes dancing, knights with bare posteriors, men defecating and grotesque heads supported bodilessly on pairs of capering legs.

In a 14th-Century book of hours, for example, one page has an illumination of the Magi visiting the Virgin Mary. In the characteristically wide margin at the bottom, three apes mimic the Wise Men. At the top left margin another ape, winged and with googly eyes, grasps one end of the illuminated initial letter as if to pull it loose. In the Rutland Psaltery there is the marginal figure of a naked man, remarkably resembling Jesus, who bends over while a figure mounted on an ostrich aims a spear at his buttocks.

On the top margin of another prayer book, a naked man and woman engage in sex; and there is a similar sex scene beneath the figure of King Harold in the Bayeux Tapestry. Camille’s examples are liberally illustrated with reproductions of the manuscript pages and, in chapters dealing with the grotesque or irreverent carvings on church doors or walls, with photographs. These are less useful; many are general views which fail to make clear the details that the author describes.

There are plenty of clear illustrations, in any case, many of them comical, charming and, to the non-specialist reader, astonishing. But the main interest of the book lies in the use which Camille makes of them.

“By the end of the 13th Century, no text was spared the irreverent explosion of marginal mayhem,” he writes. And what does it suggest, this odd polarization of texts and margins?

Sublimity, whether in religion or in courtly romance went in the middle; untroubled by the faintest skepticism, ambiguity or nuance, let alone outright mockery. These things were reserved for the margins, with a vehemence and extremity opposite to, but almost as absolute as, the center’s loftiness.

It is a fascinating suggestion of one way in which a watershed of change can show itself before it is actually there. The unitary certainties of medieval religion and feudalism were being undermined by the rise of humanism in art and thought, by a more powerful kingship, and by the increasing influence of the artisan and merchant classes. But the old unities were still in place. Instead of confronting or overthrowing them--that came later and gradually--the new spirit coexisted on the same page.

Not in our liberal sense; with argument and nuance inside a single text along with affirmation: no Supreme Court dissents issued in the same central position as the majority ruling. Yet it was an oddly enchanting application of the medieval notions of hierarchy that there was, in fact, a place for everything.

The king’s jester could speak the most cutting of truths, as long as he sat at the king’s feet. And all kinds of diversity--not just scatological or obscene--could go in a medieval text, as long as it went in the margins.

Tolerance on the margins would in most respects be quite unsatisfactory to us.

It was, it must be noted, rather convenient for those at the top of the medieval hierarchy, even if St. Boniface, as Camille tells us, worried about the suspect exuberance with which worm-like forms were embroidered on the edges of priestly vestments. In a way, by putting rebellious images in the margins, or on the doors of churches, they were drained out of the text and the church proper.

Still, the world has lived through so many absolutisms since then. Absolute monarchs and dictators. Revolutions that come out of margins take over the entire page and abolish margins altogether.

Even the most tolerant and questioning modern mentalities tend to take up the entire space they dispose of. Perhaps a rap phrase or two, printed in the margins, would improve even the most open and diverse of our editorial pages; cutting, somewhat, the expansiveness of virtue.