This one’s for you Amanda…
Medieval monks were even more dedicated than medieval painters. They would literally spend years hunched over their work in dimly lit scriptoria, slaving away to produce stunning illuminated manuscripts, painstakingly reproducing and illustrating the world’s knowledge so it wouldn’t be lost. Being the keepers of recorded human history combined with their devotion to religion tends to make us think of them as infinitely wise and spiritual, sort of like if Jesus and Morgan Freeman teamed up to open a library.
They’re basically the same person.
With all the limits their work and their religious vows put on them, the monks needed a way of entertaining themselves, and what they came up with was marginalia. Marginalia are little doodles at the edges of manuscripts, and they are not only irrelevant to the text, but also completely and utterly fucked up beyond anything that could be mistaken for rational thought. We can only assume that the monks either thought nobody would ever notice (since pretty much the only people who could read and write back then were other monks), or they just didn’t give a shit.
Here we have a stork with a man-ass and a giant dangling scrotum shitting out Ernest Hemingway:
BiblioOdyssey
You describe it better.
And here’s a goat farting diarrhea at a squire:
There are hundreds of these drawings, and each one does its best to defy any kind of explanation.
They’re essentially the medieval equivalent of a Monty Python cartoon.
(I thought the author’s writing style was for the most part funny…)
http://www.cracked.com/article_19271_8-filthy-jokes-hidden-in-ancient-works-art.html
The Fridge Art Society 
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