Cats in the Middle Ages

Dick Whittington's cat might have made his reputation according to the legend, but cats were not always a welcome sight in the Middle Ages. They were used in many amusing  marginalia, but they were considered to be linked to the supernatural and paganism. Fear of their presence, especially in time of trouble such as during the Black Death, led to events such as the Kattenstoet in Ypres.

Technically, Kattenstoet means "Festival of the Cats," which sounds delightful. It commemorates, however, the medieval practice of throwing cats from a high belfry tower in the Cloth Hall. This was considered symbolic of banishing evil. Nowadays it is less fatal for felines: a jester tosses plush toy cats from the tower to waiting arms below.

(Associating cats with the evil of the Black Death, of course, may have led to eliminating one of the potential brakes on its spread, because of course cats might have helped keep in line the spread of rodents whose fleas would have carried the disease.)

Cats weren't always disliked: the number of cats in the margin of manuscripts suggest that they were actually quite common in the monasteries where such manuscripts were being created. Cats also appear in many illustrations of domestic scenes, suggesting that they were a common pet.

The Islamic world saw cats as more preferable than "unclean" animals like dogs, probably because cats are seen cleaning themselves daily. Cats were even acceptable in mosques. Their reputation was probably enhanced by Abu Hurairah, a companion of Muhammad, whose name means "father of the kitten." He fed and cared for stray cats at his mosque. Abu Hurairah was not likely his real name, and his attachment to cats was not his most significant feature. I'll tell you more about him tomorrow.

Masters of Marginalia

Marginalia—comments, doodles, annotations, etc., made in the margin of a manuscript or book—came in many forms. Here we talked about the attempts at educating and clarifying by scholiasts.

Today we look at the less serious additions made by monks who were no doubt bored and decided to exercise their sense of humor.

There are so many web pages where you can find more in varying stages of frivolity and obscenity if you simply search "medieval marginalia" the you can send days of diversion that it would be pointless for me to try to give you more than just a bare minimum of representative figures.

These marginalia don't make much sense, in that they don't generally have anything to do with the text they accompany except in the most tenuous way. For instance, the bottom illustration in the collection I have included shows a fox as a bishop preaching to a flock of different birds, which would normally be his prey. Commentary by a monk on what he really thinks about bishops and their attitude toward their congregations? Or just an attempt at an ironic drawing of animals?

Snails actually show up frequently, often involving combat. The top right shows a snail with an animal's head. Below that is a snail fighting a knight. There is conjecture that the shell of the snail, since it resembled a kind of armor, was an appropriate foe for a knight.

Some additions are attractive additions, like the unicorn, although right above it is a curious animal-headed set of tentacles or vines. I would call that simply a doodle.

Then you have pictures that are far more irreverent than a fox preaching to birds, such as the monk sniffing the butt of an ... animal? Demon? Hard to say what it is in that top-left illustration. At least it is very attractively enclosed in the curves and points of its surrounding frame.

We should note that the making of marginalia was not that impulsive; that is, the manuscript copyist did not say to himself "I'll just out a goose playing a lute here." These were added by someone who was sitting with access to multiple colors of ink in front of him. He was the monk tasked with "prettying up" the manuscript in order to make it more valuable and less likely to bore the reader. Hundreds of years later, these colors remain on the vellum, which has got me thinking: where did colored inks/paints come from in the Middle Ages?

I will look into that question, and get back to you. See you tomorrow.

The Scholiasts

Marginalia are marks or notations or illustrations drawn into (obviously) the margin of a document. They have another name: apostils, from the Middle French verb apostiller, meaning "to add marginal notes." This in turn was from Latin postilla, "little post." The origin of postilla might be (we aren't sure) the Latin phrase post illa, which would mean (if Latin used it this way) "after these things."

Scholarly works and the Bible would have marginalia such as numbers to denote divisions of texts, or notes for liturgical use. There may even be scholia, ("comment, interpretation") which are corrections in grammar or translation or comments on the text referencing other works. Errors could creep into the arduous task of copying, and a subsequent copier of the copy could be aware that a mistake had been made, which he would seek to correct with a scholia. The person who added scholia was a scholiast, a word that goes back to the 1st century CE.

Additionally, a monk who had knowledge of a commentary on a document he was copying might decide to add scholia to offer an explanation on the particular passage in front of him. Modern book lovers debate over the propriety of writing in a book; these monks saw fit to "pre-write" into the work for clarification.

This is not to say that all scholia are to be trusted. Mistakes can be made. For example, there is a 1314 manuscript of a 3rd century text, Porphyry’s Homeric Questions (a discussion of problems that arise from reading the works of Homer). There are other manuscript copies of the works of Homer that have scholia that are clearly quoting Porphyry—and they are different. The person adding the scholia has mis-remembered the original; or did he? Maybe the person who made the 1314 copy was being sloppy while looking back and forth from the written to the being-written in front of him.

If I am in the position where I cannot digitally copy and paste, and must read + remember + type a longish passage, I must be extra careful because I know how easily my short-term memory can "smooth over" the original. I cannot imagine a monk would not try to speed up the tedious process of copying by spending less time shifting back and forth.

In the illustration above, a printed copy of Homer's Odyssey (printed in 1535), the printer Johann Herwagen (1497–1559?) has simply included (the narrower column) and additional scholia from other manuscripts, leaving the reader to decide which is preferred.

If the readers of this blog follow any other information about the Middle Ages, however, yesterday's reference to marginalia conjured images of, well, images. The phrase medieval marginalia usually makes people think of pictures, and I'll give you a representative sample of those next time.