I observe various medievalists on Twitter, and lately I came across a tweet that thoroughly amused me: apparently smiling poop emoji 💩 has a late medieval source of inspiration. As I like to repeat: everything already happened in the Middle Ages. As it happens, the motif of excrement quite…
A few times already I have written about medieval bestiaries, that is about books on animals. They include descriptions of both fantastic beasts (see HERE and HERE), as well as real animals, albeit often with rather legendary approach (see HERE). In the latter group was undoubtedly and elephant. Medieval bestiaries…
As it happens, lately I have been staying in a place with lots of cats. I do not consider myself as a cat person (I do not have my own cat), but I must admit, those cats are intriguing creatures. Especially when there is, let’s say, eight of them. As…
For some time I have been writing for Polish journal “Urologists’ Digest”, and somehow I started to pay attention to urine-related motifs in art and visual culture. And guess what – there’s lots of it! It is definitively a subject for more than one post on a blog. In his…
One of my favourite manuscripts is so called Taymouth Hours, dating back to the second quarter of the 14th century (British Library,Yates Thompson MS 13). Its name comes from Taymouth Castle in Scotland, where the manuscript was kept in the Early-Modern times (and also, it contains notes in Scots dialect…