Penis harvest and killer rabbits
The wacky 600-year-old drawings hidden in medieval manuscripts
As more and more medieval manuscripts are digitized online, the Internet is slowly discovering what scholars have apparently known for years: Books in the Middle Ages were littered with naughty drawings.
Monasteries were full of scribes who dutifully recorded all human knowledge into books made of animal skin, yet they still found plenty of time to draw monkeys pooping, nuns harvesting a penis tree or beavers biting off their own testicles.
With tips from the blog Discarding Images, National Post went directly to the source, flipping through digitized manuscripts held by the British Library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Yale University library and others. The highlights are below.
THINGS GETTING SHOT IN THE BUTT
Drawing a hunting scene was a dramatic way to jazz up the bottom of a page in a medieval manuscripts. But after pages and pages of drawing normal huntsmen, some artists started to get weird. The top image, which can be found in the Yale University Library, shows a defiant bare bottomed man who appears to be about to take a crossbow bolt in the buttocks. The other, which comes from the liturgical text of a French church official, features a monkey shooting a fellow monkey in the butt. While centuries may divide us, we can take heart that humanity retains its love of watching people receive trauma to the rear end.
UTTERLY TRIPPED-OUT MONSTERS
The modern Western world has generally settled down with a small and manageable corral of fantasy animal hybrids; centaurs, Pegasuses, mermaids and the occasional griffon. But there appeared to be no limit to the monsters that could be Frankenstein-ed by medieval scribes: bipeds with faces for bums, snail cats, birdmen fish and a particularly sad-looking man bird.
HEADLESS SWORDFIGHT
This comes from a religious text prepared for Reginald of Bar, a French bishop from the early 1300s likely killed by poisoning. Based on the books of his that survive to the present day, Reginald seemed to have a fondness for manuscripts packed with off-the-wall, psychedelic margin art. Here, two figures prepare to do battle despite the fact that both of them have already lost. Perhaps there’s an allegory there.
THE ‘WIFE’S TRYST’
This is taken from a 1405 copy of Roman de la Rose, a love story that effectively became a medieval bestseller. And, like most bestsellers, it’s packed with sex, betrayal and intrigue. This particular image, which is identified by scholars as the “wife’s tryst,” depicts a racy scene of two women getting to third base while one of their husbands sleeps only inches away. It’s held by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
THE PENIS HARVEST
As a particular favourite on social media, these are easily among the world’s most well-known medieval manuscript drawings. And, according to British medievalist Sarah Peverley, they’re made all the more interesting by the fact that they’re drawn by a woman — a gender that is generally under-represented in the field of penis doodling. These are from a copy of Roman de la Rose held by France’s national library.
CHRIST DEER
This is exactly what it looks like; a man praying to the slightly miffed head of Jesus Christ, which is attached to the top of a deer. No less than two saints (St. Hubert and St. Eustace) converted to Christianity after claiming to witness such a scene while hunting — although they reported seeing the crucifix between a stag’s antlers rather than Christ’s full head. This image is taken from a French text held by the British Library; a version of this scene can be viewed on the label for Jagermeister liqueur.
KILLER RABBITS
In the 1975 British comedy film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a signature scene was when an adorable rabbit suddenly turned vicious and began killing a group of knights. Apparently, medieval Europeans were just as amused by the idea of bunnies murdering knights. In a trope seen across multiple languages and regions of Europe, manuscript scribes included drawings of rabbits subjecting humans to various torments, including beheadings, lance blows and arrows. The two images depicting particularly dead-eyed rabbits come from a book owned by our old friend Reginald of Bar.
BEAVERS BITING OFF THEIR TESTICLES
This is another trope of the era; a beaver biting off its own testicles. The British Library text from which this image is pulled explains that hunters would seek out beavers in order to obtain the animals’ testicles, which were rumoured to have medicinal properties. To save their own lives therefore, the beavers would bite off their sex organs. Of course, this isn’t an actual behaviour of beavers — and unfortunately beaver testicles have not been found to be a good source of medicine.