We all know medieval marginalia is full of some pretty sick snail fights. No one knows why, exactly, but there are hundreds of old drawings of snails in combat with knights in old manuscripts. The ...

The marginalia of illuminated manuscripts is weird. When monks weren’t complaining about their jobs as they hand-copied line after line, they were inserting fart jokes into the margins. But one ...

Art by Pauline Baynes, the famous illustrator of J R R Tolkien and C S Lewis. Baynes got her start after producing witty reinterpretations of medieval marginalia from the Luttrell Psalter I recently ...

Knights fighting snails, murderous rabbits, mischievous monkeys. The images in medieval margins range from the playful to the bizarre. With Dr Alixe Bovey. Show more Walking fish, knights fighting ...

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To “doodle” means to draw or scrawl aimlessly, and the history of the word goes back to the early 20th century. Scribbling haphazard words, squiggly lines and mini-drawings, however, is a much older ...

Now, writing in library books is pure vandalism – “blood relative to that large-scale, public form of marginalia we call graffiti”, as Kevin Jackson pointed out in his wonderful book Invisible Forms.