Medieval doodles in the margins? Blame the children

Surreal creatures in book by 14th-century Neapolitan monk added by two children a few centuries laters, says academic

The drawings of strange animals in the margin of a precious medieval manuscript have been revealed as doodles by children, presumably bored by the dense Latin text.

The book, now in the library of the University of Pennsylvania, was written by a 14th-century monk in a Franciscan community in Naples, and includes astronomy and astrology tables, sermons, columns of biblical dates and tables for working out any day of the week between 1204 and 1512 – all thoroughly dull to the children into whose hands the manuscript fell a few centuries later.

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