The Idle Doodler
What do you doodle when bored?
Though the practice of doodling has persisted across centuries and millennia as an experience shared by every bored school child of the Middle Ages and today, what we doodle shifts and changes, reflecting the different realities in which we exist.
While we often associate the Middle Ages with richly decorated and illuminated manuscripts, gilded with shining metals and elaborate illustrations, many manuscripts were far more functional in nature, designed to convey their information with efficiency and, perhaps, a little visual panache. These workaday manuscripts, however, often reveal that even the most studious, industrious and dedicated scribe, devoting hours a day to copying a manuscript by hand to produce a new book, was still weak to boredom and waning interest in the subject of the text itself, while even the most ardent and enthusiastic reader might fin their attention drifting away.
Some scribes and readers simply wanted to add a bright spot of visual flare, beauty or humor to a purely functional book. Other times, books might fall into the hands of a small child or someone else eager for a spare scrap of space in which to scribble and scrawl. Doodlers typically had little ambition to artistic mastery, and assumed no one was likely to see the result but themselves. But their idle hands nevertheless reveal the boundless imaginations of the everyday and ordinary person. Doodles, drawings and sketches at the hands of owners can give us an idea of who held a book, and snippets into their minds and imaginations on the fringes of text and thought.
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A Complete Order of the Divine Offices According to the Use of the Monastery of the Blessed Mary of Beaugency. France, 15th Century.
Writing a manuscript by hand was often a long and arduous process using quills made from hollow bird feathers cut to a fine point. A scribe working in a monastery might dedicate up to six hours of copying from another manuscript to produce a new one, and in that time, they might write only 150-200 lines of text. Even the most industrious scribe might find their mind wandering and wish to liven their labor with an idle doodle or two.
This particular manuscript is a breviary, a book of psalms, scriptural hymns, and prayers, the “Divine Offices” intended to be read aloud to an audience at set hours of the day; it’s “according to the use” of a particular monastery, because different regions across Europe might include different prayers to local saints. Across 353 folios (706 pages) and approximately 20,000 lines of text in this copy of the Ordinatio, we might forgive a scribe’s errant attention wandering into the margins. Possibly a member of that monastery in Beaugency, this scribe livened the manuscript with doodles throughout, featuring popular subjects of idle medieval art: caricatures, cartoonish faces rendered into skewed angles of strange geometry, with bulbous noses, blushing cheeks, and flamboyant hats. Even monks may have their fun!
Ordinatio totius officii divini secundum usum monasterii Beatae Mariae de Belgentiaco. [A Complete Order of the Divine Offices According to the Use of the Monastery of the Blessed Mary of Beaugency]. France, 1400-1500. Call Number: MS B15.
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A Collection of Works by and about Aristotle. Italy, 14th Century.
In the sixth century, Roman senator and philosopher Boethius produced a translation of Aristotle’s Peri hermenias (“On Interpretation”) from Greek into Latin, here called “Pergerminias.” Aristotle’s work broke down the interpretation and understanding of words and their meanings into their purest and most basic forms, beginning first with an explanation of how we understand even things as simple as nouns and verbs before gradually building into a philosophy of how we understand literature, history, philosophy and more. Boethius’ translations would come to be the sole renditions of Aristotle available for nearly 600 years until a revival of interest in Aristotelian philosophy in the twelfth century, demonstrating how the work of a single scholar can impact the survival of information and learning.
The margins of this manuscript are a cornucopia of scribblings. On some pages every spare inch has been covered in minuscule notes by at least three different readers. This particular folio features the annotations and doodles of more than one person — first, it includes the notes of the scribe, whose handwriting matches the main text; he’s noted at the bottom of the page the first words of the following page (“significat videlicet simul…”, or “it also clearly means”), a technique called “catchwords” that helped the person binding the book make sure they had organized all the pages in the correct order.
But around that text, in worn-away ink, is the faint doodle of a later reader. In between their musings, they’ve seen to add some visual flair: the catchwords are outlined with a triangle, with a slim, polka-dotted fish and two bug-eyed birds at two corners. Those same fish feature on at least three other pages, swimming around catchwords while serving little more apparent purpose than for the amusement of the next reader who might see fit to add their own hand to the margins.
A Collection of Works by and about Aristotle, including Latin translations of Porphyry of Tyre, Praedicamenta, and Peri Hermenias. Italy, ca. 1300-1400, CE. Call Number: MS C189.
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Treatise on the Seven Capital Vices, that is, the Deadly Sins, by St. Antoninus of Florence. Italy, 15th Century.
This manuscript poses as an example of something unexpectedly rare: a manuscript written, most likely, in the lifetime of its author. Most manuscripts that survive today are often copies of copies of copies, written long after the text was originally composed. In this case, however, the manuscript was likely written during the author’s lifetime based on the style of script and watermarks, potentially copied from a very early or original manuscript. Antoninus, who died in 1459, wrote his Treatise on the Seven Capital Vices as part of a more extensive work on confessions of sins in the Catholic Church: he sought to define sins, to organize them according to their severity and nuance, as well as to give priests advice on how to treat the sins, which were regarded as sicknesses of the soul rather than the body.
To this text our scribe has also added a scattering of poetry, much of it far lighter than the “Deadly” sins to which the bulk of the manuscript is dedicated. In the last selection of pages, they included an extensive list of liturgical incipits, the opening words and phrases of set prayers meant to help the reader remember prayers and masses that were meant to be recited on certain days and at set hours.
Throughout the text, the scribe diligently marks in the most studious manner, adding only nota benes (abbreviations for “note well,” to instruct the reader to pay particular attention to an important line) and the occasional initial letter ornamented in spiraling curves of red ink. But by the end of the text, they break, unexpectedly, from tradition and serious subject matter. On the final page, whether due to flagging energy or the desire to “conclude” the text with a final flare, the scribe has added two plump birds, a fleeting moment of frivolity in an otherwise solemn text.
Trattato de'sette vitii capitali cioè de peccati mortali [Treatise on the Seven Capital Vices, that is, the Deadly Sins], by St. Antoninus of Florence, ca. 1450. Call Number: MS A15.
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Above: Leaf from the Triodion Book of Hymns. Western Greece or Southern Italy,11th Century.
Below: Lexicon [Dictionary], once attributed to Iōánnēs Zōnarâs. Greece, 15th Century.
Sometimes, doodles served a purpose. The margins were not simply empty blank spaces for medieval imaginations to idly play but instead spare space for practice and rough drafts for future art. Most manuscripts in the European Middle Ages were made of parchment, produced by stripping animal skins of their hair and stretching them into thin, pliant sheets cut into the shape of pages. The process was long, arduous, and expensive. Every empty inch could be valuable real estate for rough drafts, sketches, and designs. Paper, meanwhile, made it to Europe and Greece through Arabic traders in the eleventh century but didn’t truly take hold until the fourteenth. Then, however, it gradually became the dominant medium for books and manuscripts.
But in these early years, both vellum and paper were precious commodities, and spare blank space was not something ignored: manuscripts seen as less valuable or useful might be reused as scrap paper for other projects.
These two manuscripts, side by side, show the shifting technologies across centuries, yet the constancy of doodles within a single culture: the parchment leaf on the left contains the Triodion, the hymns meant to be sung for the days from the beginning of Lent to Easter. It dates to the eleventh century and potentially from either what would today be Western Greece or Southern Italy. On the right, 350 years later, we have a manuscript made on paper, a dictionary or Lexicon once attributed to Iōánnēs Zōnarâs, a twelfth-century Greek historian, though now his authorship is considered uncertain. Yet despite the chronological distance between these two manuscripts, both have been taken as scrap paper by later readers, and both have a distinctly geometrical style to their doodles, with lines interweaving into coiled and twisted shapes.
MS P759’s doodles give the air of a bored hand testing out a new quill pen: the margin is marked with dark black flicks and twirls of ink alongside the triangular design at the bottom of the page. These are “pen trials,” the scratches and scribbles of testing a feather freshly cut into a quill used to carry ink.
However, the fifteenth-century Lexicon’s patterns are crammed into neat rectangles. Greek manuscripts often used these bars to create borders between chapters and paragraphs, helping the reader visually separate out sections within a book. Here, the bars aren’t fit between pages or paragraphs. Instead, they float about, unanchored debris in the margins of an otherwise clean and tidy page. It’s possible that a scribe used this page as practice for the design that they would then refine into a final product on the page of a different manuscript.
Rough drafts like these reveal the way values of information change over time: what was once precious might become little more than scrap paper to someone else.
Above Item: Leaf from the Triodion Book of Hymns. Western Greece or Southern Italy, ca. 1000-1100 CE. Call Number: MS P759.
Below Items: Lexicon [Dictionary], Anonymous. Greece, 15th Century. Call Number: MS D14.