Illuminated Manuscripts and Doodling

Illuminated Manuscripts and Doodling

Many of us find ourselves doodling on notes in class due to boredom but doodling has been around longer than you would think. Illuminated manuscripts were made before the printing press during the Medieval time period and were hand written, decorated books. Since writing could take hours and days to complete, scribs would draw weird pictures that ranged from inappropriate to nonsense. This could be comparable to surrealism artwork but that was already previously talked about in my first blog. When you hear the world doodle, you probably think of your pencil drawings on your college ruled notebook paper. However, these doodles were made by ink and quail feather and sometimes even used gold or silver. Some that have been found have shown a woman picking penises off of a tree like an apple. This reminds me of the movie, SuperBad, where Jonah Hill gets caught in class for doodling penises everywhere in class. Isn’t it interesting how not much has changed. Illuminated manuscripts compared to doodling today seem to go hand and hand when it comes to the time period they are in. Illuminated manuscripts seem to be the way to pass time without writing it all down or maybe a form of escape from the everyday work these people were doing. While with doodling we are not escaping from manual labor sometimes doodling is good for mental breaks within a class or even working on a long project it adds the needed breaks we need.