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Maryam Mo posted in the group Literature
Medieval illuminations range from serious to silly, and we might assume that jousting snails and mooning monks were jokes inserted by a scribe who was getting away with something. But u/rimeroyal tells us that often they were silly or distracting on purpose.Nearly every single page [of one book] has some kind of bizarre figure in the margins, ranging from knights dueling snails to disembodied heads with chicken legs to…well, you get the idea. A lot of money went into this psalter—the doodles are deliberate. What purpose they serve is kind of an ongoing debate, since we don’t have a blunt explanation about them, but because this is a religious text, one suggestion I’ve seen is that they’re supposed to be distractions that tempt you to look away from the sacred text and waste your time quietly laughing at the buttholes.
-Life Hacker