The information that people would get from these manuscripts would influence their daily lives, to a certain point. Their main objective was to moralize the reader. Today, Bestiaries are fascinating sources that give us a peek into the medieval mind and culture. For example: the panther was thought to be a “multi-coloured beast” that breathed “a very sweet smell” that would attract other animals the beaver would amputate its testicles because it knew that the hunter wanted them alone, rather than the whole animal, in order to make a powerful medicine or the foul dragon (aka, the Devil), the only arch-enemy of the elephant and the panther (aka, Jesus Christ).Īs it is easy to understand, these texts contained myths and superstitions and had quite the share of fantasy in them. In these books it is also explained what their symbolism was in the middle ages, and what they represented within Christian religion.
Here at Sexy Codicology, we got curious and asked ourselves: “ What do Bunnies represent in Medieval Culture?”Ī very useful primary source to consult is a medieval Bestiary (a so-called “Book of Beasts”), a genre of manuscripts typical of England, which present a collection of various animals’ descriptions, both real and mythical ones. This usually means that the bunny is the hunted however, as we discovered, often the illuminators decided to change the roles around, ending up with something like this miniature here: A psychotic killer rabbit from – Paris, Bibl. Hunting scenes are common in medieval manuscripts’ marginalia.
In this blog post we like to show you images of bunnies that have decided to go killer or ninja, the Bunnies striking back! Hunting the Medieval Killer Rabbit in Illuminated Manuscripts For example: The monkey is a popular animal to take over the human role in the marginal decorations but so is the rabbit, along with many other animals. Often, in medieval manuscripts’ marginalia we find odd images with all sorts of monsters, half man-beasts, monkeys, and more even in religious books the margins sometimes have drawings that simply are making fun of monks, nuns and bishops. 149v.Īs imaginable, the first thing that this marginal decoration reminded our followers of was the hilarious scene of the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog, in Monty Python’s famous movie: Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Follow him on Twitter at on Facebook.Support us on Patreon! The Original Killer Rabbit.
FUNNY MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPTS SERIES
His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Lewis in Her Marginalia: He’s an “Abysmal Bastard”īased in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcas ts on cities, language, and culture.
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All this contains a lesson for today’s marginalia-makers: if you’re going to sign your name, sign it in full. “Charter evidence suggests that a woman called Eadburg was abbess of a female religious community at Minster-in-Thanet, in Kent from at least 733 until her death sometime between 748 and 761,” writes Barrett, but she wasn’t the only Eadburg who could’ve possessed the book. Other new discoveries in the manuscript’s pages include “tiny, rough drawings of figures - in one case, of a person with outstretched arms, reaching for another person who is holding up a hand to stop them.” What Eadburg meant by it all remains a matter of active inquiry, but then, so does her very identity. Eadburg’s name, reports the Guardian‘s Donna Ferguson, was found “passionately etched into the margins of the manuscript in five places, while abbreviated forms of the name appear a further ten times.” The scanning process collects images that “map the direction and height of the original’s surface, and are processed into renders showing only the relief of the original with the tone and color removed.” Subsequent steps of filtering and enhancement result in a digital reproduction of “the three-dimensional surface of the page,” which, with the proper enhancements, finally allows drypoint inscriptions to be seen. To see all of them necessitated the use of a technique called “photometric stereo,” which Oxford University’s Bodleian Library Senior Photographer John Barrett explains in this blog post. But unlike most of them, Eadburg seems to have favored a drypoint stylus - i.e., a tool with nothing on it to leave a clear mark - which would have made her writing nearly impossible to notice with the naked eye.
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