The Deliberate Doodler

Biblical Commentary, Anonymous. Italy, Late 14th Century.

In this fifteenth-century commentary on the Bible, someone — potentially the scribe who wrote the original manuscript, or perhaps a later owner — has added in Heraldic, spread-winged eagle, holding a staff or perched on a branch. Eagles were associated with an ascent into heaven and, in turn, with contemplation of the Bible. Biblical commentators often derived this symbolism from Isidore of Seville, who took the legends of eagle-eyed vision as a symbol of the great insight and acuity granted by contemplation. Pope Gregory the Great, likewise, likened eagles to Saints, with their soaring flights and high-perched nests a reflection of virtuous disdain for earthly delights. Meanwhile, the Book of Ezekiel connects each of the four Evangelists, identifying St. John with the eagle due to his deep understanding of divine gospel and because his Book of Revelations embodied the element of foresight. 

The eagle addition may have been praise upon the commentary, implying it was exceptionally insightful; or it may have been an exhortation to future readers: by reading the commentary, one might be elevated and lifted to the heavens on an eagle’s wings. 

Biblical Commentary. Anonymous. Italy (Likely Venice), ca. 1450-1500. Call Number: MS C69.

Gallus, Abbot of Königssaal’s Malogranatum. Germany, 15th Century.

Malogranatum means “Pomegranate,” so named after lines from the Song of Songs that compare a bride to the beauty and sweetness of pomegranates, together with the line “I would give you spiced wine to drink, the juice of my pomegranates.” Malogranatum was written by Gallus, the Abbot of Königssaal in the 1370s. In it, he offered a compilation of devotional quotations from 80 other works, reframed into a series of lessons and conversations between a religious mentor and his student on matters of sin and spiritual perfection. He particularly emphasized seeking direct communion with God through prayer, meditation, and contemplation, rather than through the mediation of priests. It swiftly became a best-seller of spiritual devotional texts in the later Middle Ages, with a whopping 150 surviving manuscripts. Ours made its way here from Minden, Germany, based on a helpful note of one Mauritio Symeoni who claimed ownership of the book, but multiple scribes added their own contributions to the pages of the book over the years. 

At least one spiritual scribbler took an artistic touch, adding a smorgasbord of doodles and illustrations through the manuscript’s pages. The virgin Mary, holding an infant Jesus, appears in four doodles with increasing detail. They may have been a rough draft of some finer work. The opening page also features three saints marked by their halos and croziers, alongside an inhabited initial — St. George fighting the dragon, shaped into an “S” to begin the second paragraph’s “Sancta trinitas.” 

These doodles provide a sly conversation with the text. While the Virgin Mary does not appear in the text’s narrations, the title Malogranatum itself implicitly evokes her. Pomegranates were considered both a symbol of the bride of the Song of Songs (that is, the Virgin Mary as the Bride of God) and a symbol of the union between a human’s soul with God, with Mary as the pinnacle of such a union. By the later Middle Ages, the connection between the Song of Songs, Pomegranates, and the Virgin Mary had grown increasingly popular. Though the scribe’s illustrations of the Virgin Mary might look like little more than rough drafts or rudimentary practices, they are actually a deliberate commentary on the central role of the Virgin Mary in attaining spiritual perfection: that all of the advice contained within the text is, at its core, the sweet juice of the pomegranate, all embodied in the Virgin Mary. 

Gallus, Abbot of Königssaal’s Malogranatum. German (Minden), 1425-1499. Call Number: MS C164.

Giordano Ruffo’s On the Medicine of Horses/Hippiatria. Late 13th Century.

The Hippiatria, sometimes called De Medicina Equorum, (On the Medicine of Horses), was the first treatise of veterinary medicine in medieval Europe. Texts on caring for the ailments of animals had fallen out of popularity by the seventh century, even while human medical texts survive in copies transmitted from generation to generation. The gap between human and horse medicine suggests that most veterinary care was left to informally educated laymen, who shared home-grown remedies by word of mouth. Giordano Ruffo broke that silence in the 1240s. Ruffo was a soldier, nobleman, and horse farrier to the King of Sicily, Frederick II. His work brought equine medicine back into the realm of the learned and the elite, as the original text was written in Latin, the language of scholars and theologians. Sicily was a hotbed of learning in the thirteenth century. It stood in the center of the Mediterranean trade, allowing Arabic, Greek, and Latin learning to mingled. 

This manuscript was copied only a few decades after Ruffo’s original writing, dating to the turn of the thirteenth century. Many later copies of Ruffo’s text highlight the elevation of veterinary medicine into a prestigious science by adding refined, ornate illustrations of horses, their anatomy, and treatments. But this early example is much more of a “workhorse” example of a manuscript: the script is written tidily, with minor visual flares of red ink (called “rubrication”) to help the reader visually navigate the page. But its pages show clear evidence of heavy use over the years: staining, warped vellum and signs of wear. This was not someone’s prized possession over the years and may well have been a practical text that saw routine use and reference, pulled out to review medicinal recipes and treatments for an ailing equine.  

To this pragmatic and practical text, however, a later owner added their own unique flare: a pair of doodles of some adorably rotund ponies. One is a profile of a horse on the cover, and the other is on the opening page of the index of chapters and subjects, but both are equally round. The artist may have intended the art as a tool for easily identifying the manuscript’s content without necessarily reading the text itself, the equivalent of putting the book’s title on its spine. In this way, art can have an aesthetic but also practical function, communicating the text’s content in a snappy, visual medium. 

Hippiatria, by Giordano Ruffo. Italy, 1290-1310. Call Number: MS E256.

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. Germany, late 15th Century.

Sir John Mandeville’s Travels purported to be the tales of an English knight journeying across North Africa, the Middle East, and even into India and China. The text exploded in popularity in the late Middle Ages and even rivaled Marco Polo’s own story of his time in China and Mongolia, with over 300 manuscripts surviving today and even making its way onto the shelves of Leonardo da Vinci.  Yet Mandeville himself likely never existed – or if he did, he certainly never accomplished the tales of his Travels, as the work actually cobbles together earlier known sources of travel accounts and narratives. 

This copy of Mandeville counts itself among those 300 surviving copies and originated in Germany shortly before 1472. The scribe included a number of illustrations, including the writing of (alleged) foreign alphabets and several coats of arms. But in one margin, they’ve also slipped in a particular doodle that will be familiar to the modern eye: a heart pierced with an arrow. While the other elements of illustration are fit into the frame of the text itself, this heart is the sole moment where the scribe broke away from the framework of the text to add an element to the periphery.

The heart symbol in medieval Europe had its earliest roots in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century, with the oldest known example found in a poem titled the Roman de la Poire (“Romance of the Pear”). It was solidly popularized by the fifteenth century as a symbol of not only human anatomy, but also love and passion.

Itinerarium [The Journey, or Travels], by Sir John Mandeville. Germany, 1472. Call Number: MS E16.