Marginalia: sacred or secular?

I hate to say it, but almost every time I see a secular person comment on religion like the above event, it's a revelation of ignorance. The reason why there are all kinds of weird and wonderful things *in the margins* or *on the edges* of medieval church architecture and fittings is because they are the fringe things. They aren't the things that should be the central focus of attention.

You will not find these things associated with the 'heart' or centre of a church building. But they exist, so they need to be portrayed, since medieval churches were intended as 'microcosms', that is, miniature representations of the entire universe.

Once this is said, the headline above looks stupid.

Medieval people could deal with sex and idiosyncratic or aberrant behaviour more sensibly than we can. Our modern focus on control and purity (especially moral) means we leave nothing alone, and therefore go a bit kooky when confronted with things that cannot be rationally explained.

The medieval world dealt with those things by putting them in the margin, and not normalising them. We, on the other hand, have no clear boundary between central things and marginal things. Sexuality, immigration, health care ... all these debates are about this very problem of inside vs outside. But because we have no central thing, nothing higher that can resolve the issue, our national political debates are never resolved.

That's why we are living in clown world, folks.

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