We all know medieval marginalia is full of some pretty sick snail fights. No one knows why, exactly, but there are hundreds of old drawings of snails in combat with knights in old manuscripts. The ...

The marginalia of illuminated manuscripts is weird. When monks weren’t complaining about their jobs as they hand-copied line after line, they were inserting fart jokes into the margins. But one ...

It’s common to find, in the blank spaces of 13th- and 14th-century English texts, sketches and notes from medieval readers. And scattered through this marginalia is an oddly recurring scene: a brave ...

The reason so many knights did battle with snails in the margins of medieval manuscripts remains a mystery (Credit: The British Library) The pages of medieval books are stalked by a ferocious monster: ...

Snails wielding swords and fighting off knights. Elephants that look like oversized golden retrievers. Dogs with uncanny proportions and hauntingly human eyes. Cats wearing clothes and playing musical ...

Art by Pauline Baynes, the famous illustrator of J R R Tolkien and C S Lewis. Baynes got her start after producing witty reinterpretations of medieval marginalia from the Luttrell Psalter I recently ...

How do you spice up the dull task of copying line after line of a medieval manuscript? Some monks added lighthearted touches to the marginalia of their manuscripts by doodling murderous beasts, penis ...