- #Cats as marginalia in medieval manuscripts how to
- #Cats as marginalia in medieval manuscripts series
The animal musicians probably belong to the popular theme in medieval marginalia of ‘the world turned upside down’.
#Cats as marginalia in medieval manuscripts series
A whole musical troupe of cats, pigs, dogs and rabbits is shown in concert over a series of five leaves in the Penitential Psalms, and others also appear throughout the manuscript. One particularly well-represented subject in this Book of Hours is animal musicians. Later in the manuscript we see the conclusion of the tale: a fox running away with an unlucky member of the congregation in his jaws.Ī fox teacher instructs a dog pupil: Harley MS 6563, ff. The fox leans on a pilgrim’s staff and gestures emphatically while the birds gaze on in gullible wonder. Two double-page scenes in the manuscript show a fox preaching to a flock of birds.
One much-loved character who makes a prominent appearance in the margins of this Book of Hours is the crafty fox, trickster and master of disguise, who was well-known to medieval audiences from the Renard the Fox stories and other animal fables. The meanings of these themes are much debated and there are no definite answers, but this uncertainty makes marginalia all the more fun to puzzle over. While endlessly inventive, this kind of playful marginalia found in manuscripts of the 13th-14th centuries tended to draw on certain reccurring themes which were common to medieval art of other media such as stained-glass windows, wall paintings, misericords and stone carvings, as well as popular literature of the time. Maintained by historian Marjorie Burghart, of the European Association for Digital Humanities, the album's featured manuscripts range from the 9th to the 15th century.A rabbit runs into a hole on one side of the page and emerges on the other side: Harley MS 6563, f.
#Cats as marginalia in medieval manuscripts how to
The photo will be featured in the Interactive Album of Medieval Paleography, a collection of transcription exercises intended to help train students and amateurs in the practical aspects of reading manuscript texts-especially how to decipher medieval handwriting. " could perhaps encourage at least one researcher to dedicate more time to the history of Dubrovnik, its immediate Hinterland (Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia), and the wider Mediterranean region." While it makes for an interesting cat meme, Filipović hopes the photo will move beyond a fun find and inspire more interest in the medieval Mediterranean. In the course of his research-which Filipović started in 2008-he's come across small doodles, strange fungi, elaborate decorated initials, holes presumably drilled through the manuscripts by worms or other pests, and even carefully crafted watermarks. But the more time spent scouring manuscripts, the better the chances of stumbling across oddities. "It's not very often that a researcher can come across curious things while sifting through monotonous and dull archival registers," Filipović said. "I never could have imagined the attention that those prints would subsequently receive," Filipović wrote in an email.įilipović sent the photo to fellow historian Erik Kwakkel via Twitter in September 2012, but it wasn't until earlier this year that the paw prints saw a flurry of reblogging, retweeting, and sharing.
Filipović, a teaching and research assistant at the University of Sarajevo, discovered pages of the book stained with the inky paw prints of a cat and snapped a picture-something he planned on sharing with colleagues and students for a laugh.
While thumbing through the medieval manuscript in July 2011, Emir O. But perhaps no other feline has walked through history in quite the fashion that a Mediterranean cat did when it left paw prints across the pages of a 15th century manuscript from Dubrovnik, Croatia (map).
From ancient Egyptian religions to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat" to the latest I Can Haz Cheeseburger meme, felines, literature, and culture have enjoyed a long love affair.
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