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.
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. The stereotypical image of the medieval person as a God-fearing, filthy, barbarous peasant is ubiquitous throughout film, television and. Ever since the Renaissance, the society of the medieval era has been the butt of many unfair, generalised tropes. " 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." Manuscript marginalia challenge the preconceived ideas many people hold about medieval art. 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. Thanks to this little liberty, there is now such a. "It's not very often that a researcher can come across curious things while sifting through monotonous and dull archival registers," Filipović said. Marginalia are drawings (often very frivolous) that medieval monks left in the margins of manuscripts.
"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). Cats have long since been admired and intriguing to. She says that “the armored snail fighting the armored knight is a reminder of the inevitability of death,” a sentiment captured in Psalm 58 of the bible: “ Like a snail that melteth away into slime, they shall be taken away like a dead-born child, they shall not see the sun.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. And none of these ancient artifacts has most captivated our cat-lover minds as their medieval cat art. Silly knight, it’s just a snail! “įor Digital Medievalist, Lisa Spangenberg floated another idea.
The valiant snails could be a commentary on social oppression, or it could just be medieval humor, says Got Medieval: “We’re supposed to laugh at the idea of a knight being afraid of attacking such a “heavily armored” opponent. The British Library says that the scene could represent the Resurrection, or it could be a stand in for the Lombards, “a group vilified in the early middle ages for treasonous behaviour, the sin of usury, and ‘non-chivalrous comportment in general.’” No one knows what, exactly, the scenes really mean. Photo: Brunetto Latini’s Li Livres dou Tresor, c 1315-1325 via British Library