Book historian documents bored scribes' scribbles in 1,000-year-old Medieval manuscripts
Before Gutenberg invented the printing press, the book business could be a form of torture. Imagine copying out page after page of Fifty Shades of Grey with a quill pen, all day, every day, for the rest of your life. Considering that existence, it's not surprising that Medieval scribes let their attention and pens wander from time to time out of boredom.
"I encountered [scribe doodles] almost every day as I read Medieval books," Professor Erik Kwakkel, a book historian at Leiden University in Holland, tells As It Happens host Carol Off. "They're found on average pages."
These 13th and 14th century doodles were also exercises to start the flow of ink on the nibs scribes' quills.
"There are locations that are very doodle-friendly, they are empty, blank," Kwakkel says. "If the scribe wants to test his pen, he tends to go to those pages. They're found on the front and back of the manuscript, sort of hidden."
Some of these doodles were nondescript scribbles or stick men. Others are cartoonish depictions of people and places.
"I like the ones that are made by scribes that try to produce a decorated letter," he says. "A scribe is not supposed to do any decoration, but he sees decoration all around him and when he tries to see if his pen is in order, he might want to try one of these beautiful letters -- a 'B' or a 'D.'
"That's what you find quite frequently on the back of these empty pages. A scribe is making a beautiful letter 'B,' he thinks, but actually it looks very poor because he's a scribe, not a decorator."
More than 1,000 years ago, the cost of a hand-inked book was expensive and only for the very wealthy.
Kwakkel says it could take a year or longer for a scribe to produce a single book.
Here are some more examples of scribe doodles that Kwakkel has documented:
