Silly medieval art

Many of our readers will already be familiar with our Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts, a resource which enables you to search by shelfmark, keyword, or date, as well as by more advanced fields such as language and provenance. We thought it was about time to give a reminder that all...

Medieval Monster Hunter

Our guest blogger Orderic Vitalis recalls a terrible conversation with the priest Walkelin, who experienced a horrible haunting in a Normandy forest one clear January night... Are you sitting comfortably? Then we will begin...

Yo, medieval scribes: no one's going to read the text you so painstakingly lettered if you continue to draw weird and dirty pictures in the margins. Well, I guess you're all dead, so we can't fix this now, can we?

1. This Abandoned Villa in Italy After a little digging for more context, this place is rumoured to belong to Villa Pirotta in Brunate, a village on an hill over Como, Italy. This room may be inside one of several buildings on the estate, which is currently listed for sale on Sotheby's. P

Who's dog is it or who is it anyway?

In this article, we provide an odd collection of medieval art, taken from manuscripts of the time. Many of the images are "marginalia" — scribbles and doodles in the margins of documents. Although the words "medieval Europe" conjure up images of plague, witches and torture, it seems that medieval Europeans enjoyed a good laugh, too.

egg-horse L'estoire de Merlin, France ca. 1316 (BL, Add 10292, fol. 213r)