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The Doodles Hidden In Medieval Manuscripts (With Pictures)
Why they are there and what they look like
Illuminated manuscripts are some of the most impressive creations ever made by people. They took hundreds of hours to complete. Illuminated manuscripts featured hauntingly beautiful drawings of famous scenes. Each character was meticulously written out by dedicated writers who could not afford to make a single mistake. Anyone who has worked with a Medieval illuminated manuscript knows how special these works truly are.
But if you look closely at some of the most impressive books ever made by human hands you will see something odd. Buried in the middle of these masterpieces are doodles. Grotesques. There are images akin to that of a daydreaming schoolkid. Mystical creatures. Unflattering portraits. Whimsical scribbles. These doodles are called drolleries and they can be found in multiple illuminated manuscripts ranging over 250 years.
What did these doodles look like? Why would dedicated monks doodle in their life’s greatest work?
A School of Thought
There were some monasteries and illustration schools that taught their students to use drolleries in their illustrations. One of the most famous movements came from the East Anglican school of illumination which heavily emphasized putting drolleries into the margins of their manuscripts. Whether this was to entertain the end user or to distinguish their illustrators from others of the age, we don’t know. We do know that manuscripts that are linked to the East Anglican school of illumination feature an usually large number of drolleries.
Some historians think that the doodles represented something about the monastery that the manuscripts originated from or something about the individual illustrator. It could have been a way for an individual artist to put a piece of themselves into their work in what was an otherwise rigorous and highly…
