Transcription
A drawing of a naked person being dragged away by a green demon; the drawing is surrounded by a border with various drawn mussels and clams. The caption reads “Monk 1: What are you drawing? Monk 2: A poor soul being dragged to hell by demons. Monk 1: Cool! And what are you planning to use as a border? Monk 2: I’m thinking freshwater mussels. Monk 1: That’s really perfect.”
Deacon: “Brother Ted, you’ve messed it up again. I clearly said I wanted a demon with giant muscles!”
Brother Ted: “But that’s what I did. You can clearly see the mussels all around the border!”
Middle-ages cloistered monks really had a lot of time on their hands and no other entertainment, so yeah, crazy art of whatever comes to mind.
I think the period that this book was illuminated in was from later when really fancy books was more of a business for the church. Usually the very early illuminated books were made by a single monk doing most steps of the process (prepping parchment, calligraphy, painting, binding, etc.) but the later books like this may have had different artists for the illuminated letters vs the borders. So there could have been one monk that just likes sea stuff and he was too good for the other brothers to tell him to stop.
Source: mostly vibes, but I’ve dipped my toes into illumination and guilding
Weren’t they also often chained to the desks to meet their deadlines tbf?
The first thing that comes up on a websearch is books being chained to desks, to keep them from getting borrowed. I can’t imagine monks chained to their desks will be motivated to do good work, let alone fine art like illumination. Especially if they’re under a deadline, which would serve to propagate errors and misspellings.
What makes them freshwater mussels? They look like regular ones to my uneducated eye.
I’m not versed enough in mussels to say.
Op doesent lift confirmed
IIRC mussels were “unclean”, so would that jive with the whole demonic sin thing?
Fun fact: it’s “jibe” not “jive” - https://www.grammarly.com/commonly-confused-words/jibe-vs-jive
Please don’t take this as me being an asshole, it’s just that English is my second language, and I find this kind of stuff fascinating.
TIL.
Second-language English speaker correcting first-language speaker - are you Dutch by any chance?
Nope, Russian. But I’ve been speaking English for longer than I’ve been speaking Russian. Plus, Russia sucks, so I was like extra motivated to learn English and GTFO.
Me? I just speak jive and this sentence saying I only understand jive.
Jibe is also a term from sailing meaning to reset a sail attached to a boom
https://www.etymonline.com/word/jibe
try not to get too caught up on the dictionary meaning of words, languages are living, to jive with something could to dance together
interesting that jive and jibe have the b/v in them so can be easy to mix them either way
I like the cut of your jibe
TIL, thanks for sharing.
Leviticus 11 9 “‘Of all the creatures living in the water of the seas and the streams you may eat any that have fins and scales. 10 But all creatures in the seas or streams that do not have fins and scales—whether among all the swarming things or among all the other living creatures in the water—you are to regard as unclean. 11 And since you are to regard them as unclean, you must not eat their meat; you must regard their carcasses as unclean. 12 Anything living in the water that does not have fins and scales is to be regarded as unclean by you"
I love these because it give us a glimpse into oldschool metaphors that were so, so obvious at the time. Like of course you’re going to slap down some mussels on that hell talk because it’s an unclean abomination.
And of course you’re gonna give a pregnant women a pomegranate, and make sure jesus has a pelican. Why wouldn’t jesus be hanging with a pelican? If not, at least make sure he’s holding a fish and there’s a shepherd in there somewhere.
The illuminaries were memelord shitposters.
Fresh water mussels with a side order of tortured soul, yumm
Old medieval pages look so fascinating. Too bad the letters are so beautifully drawn that I can’t even try reading what each word says.
It’s probably in German if that helps you.
That makes it even worse, I don’t speak German.
Blackletter is really easy to read once you know what you’re looking at, more often than not it’s in Latin, but yeh I think the extremely compressed .jpg above is German, it wouldnt be modern german anyway
Monk 2: I sure hope my painstakingly hand drawn illumination won’t be nitpicked by some smug jerk from the future.
illumination
minor spelling mistake detected; agent “blue” dispatched
I feel like this is what happens when 2 people work on different parts of a project without any kind of coordination between them
Monk 3: Monk 2 had drawn a kickass devil and asked me decorate the borders with fire, but I am out of red ink, the mussels will do.
Though, I suspect they were likely separated by time more so than organizational inefficiecy.
Don’t be shellfish.
This could literally be a Dwarf Fortress randomly generated inscription.
Those mussel drawings are strangely realistic compared to the human.
They can hold a pose for longer.
…and hell is inside a gigantic otter?
Well, have you ever been inside a gigantic otter? If you know, you know…
Very strategic leg placement there.
The demon’s face says he doesn’t mind.
Looks like his eyes are bugging out from being kneed in the groin to me.
Those demons… one is so over it, the other is shocked by the same exact thing for the 468733 time.
