Cats and Scribes
We don’t usually expect mischief in the solemn world of parchment and ink. Medieval manuscripts come to us with an aura of reverence: rare, fragile, and guarded behind climate-controlled glass. So when we see a trail of inky pawprints marching across a fifteenth-century page, the reaction is double-edged. It’s delightful—because it’s a cat, doing exactly what cats still do—and it feels strangely intimate, because we instantly recognize the scene from our own lives: the cat on the keyboard, the paw in the wet paint, the tail in the ink (or tea for those not old enough to remember ink). And yet it’s simultaneously a bit shocking, because some small, furry agent has cheerfully vandalized what we’ve been taught to treat as rare and sacred.
That tension between delight and shock helps explain why historian Emir O. Filipović’s snapshot of inky pawprints in a fifteenth-century Dubrovnik manuscript spread so quickly online. A casual archive photo of a cat’s tracks on parchment suddenly became internet-famous—because it shows, in one glance, how ordinary feline chaos can intrude even on the most serious of books. But scenes like this are far from unique: cats have been causing havoc for scribes, and padding through wet ink and across open pages for as long as humans have been keeping written records.
https://theappendix.net/posts/2013/03/of-cats-and-manuscripts
Cats and scribes kept each other’s company for very practical reasons. Scriptoria and archives were enclosed, fairly temperature-controlled spaces, so they were pleasant places for both humans and animals to linger. Where there were books, there was also grain, glue, parchment, and crumbs: all the things that attracted mice and rats, for whom that valuable parchment was also, unfortunately, rather delicious. Cats followed the rodents in, and scribes tolerated (or welcomed) them as living pest control—so of course they ended up padding across desks, laps, and sometimes freshly inked pages. It’s no wonder, then, that the same cats also crept into the margins as doodles, jokes, and little portraits drawn by the scribes who lived with them every day.
