drollery

thumb|Drollery detail from the Hours of Charles the Noble thumb|upright|Page from the 14th-century Luttrell Psalter, showing two drolleries in the right margin.

A drollery, often also called a grotesque, is a small decorative image in the margin of an illuminated manuscript, most popular from about 1250 through the 15th century, though found earlier and later. The most common types of drollery images appear as mixed creatures, either between different animals, or between animals and human beings, or even between animals and plants or inorganic things. Examples include cocks with human heads, dogs carrying human masks, archers winding out of a fish's mouth, bird-like dragons with an elephant's head on the back. Often they have a thematic connection with the subject of the text of the page, and larger miniatures, and they usually form part of a wider scheme of decorated margins, though some are effectively doodles added later. The word comes from the French drôlerie, meaning a joke.