Medieval doodles in the margins? Blame the children
Surreal creatures in book by 14th-century Neapolitan monk added by two children a few centuries later, says academic.
The drawings of strange animals in the margin of a precious medieval
manuscript have been revealed as doodles by children, presumably bored
by the dense Latin text.
The book, now in the library of the University of Pennsylvania, was
written by a 14th-century Franciscan monk in Naples, and includes
astronomy and astrology tables, sermons, columns of biblical dates and
tables for working out any day of the week between 1204 and 1512 – all
thoroughly dull to the children into whose hands the manuscript fell a
few centuries later.
We have been remiss – this story has been getting passed around on social media and we are only just getting around to sharing it ourselves! It’s our manuscript: LJS 361, a collection of Astronomical and astrological tables. Included on a few folios are some marginal doodles which Dr. Deborah Thorpe from the University of York has identified as being drawn by children. Unfortunately the story linked above, from the Guardian, doesn’t identify the manuscript by shelfmark (a big no-no! Always identify your manuscripts, folks!), but here’s a link to another article (from the University of York) that does. And here is LJS 361 on OPenn. (Below is a clip from folio 26r.)
