Anyone owned by a cat will sympathise with this long ago scribe in Dubrovnik:
Obviously, the feline was attempting to add some catligraphy.
Usually I try to avoid posting in cat threads as my username could easily be misinterpreted. I think I’m safe in this one, though.
It’s a medieval catastrophe.
A poem about a cat written in the 9th century by an Irish monk at an abbey in Germany:
I and Pangur Ban my cat,
'Tis a like task we are at:
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.
From other medieval manuscripts:
When I was a kid I did a Paint by Numbers image, then left it to dry on my desk, flat down on the desk top.
While I wasn’t around, my cat jumped up on my desk, walked over the painting, and left multicolored paw prints on my blotter, desk top , and the hood of my jacket that was hanging on the chair.
By the time I found all this, the paint was dry.
This topic was right next to one called Kitty, come back.
How marvelous is this world that I can retrieve the image above by typing “illuminated manuscript cat licking butt” into search?
ETA:
Dubrovnik is a mystery cat,
He likes to ink his paw,
And walk across the manuscript,
Ignoring the abbot’s law.
He’s the bane of the scriptorium,
And the scribes all despair,
For when they reach the scene of the crime,
Dubrovnik is not there!
(After T.S. Eliot’s “Macavity the Mystery Cat.”)
More seriously, susan, can you link to your second image of the cat licking his butt? I can read the letters easily enough (I studied calligraphy for years), but I’d like to see a link to the entire document. I don’t doubt your source, but as a student of such documents, I’d like to see what this document says.
It looks like the end of 1 Maccabees, Latin Vulgate Bible.
("…et misit regi ut mitteret eis exercitum in auxilium…")
There is, of course, an entire web-page on the net devoted to this topic:
I’m not sure that this is what Tim Berners-Lee and Al Gore had in mind when they invented the internet.
There is an artist’s studio on the other side of my door. Recently the artist arrived to find mouse tracks across a drying painting, complete with an adorable thin line behind the paw prints, presumably from its tail.
Now one of my cats likes to spend the night in the studio (the artist is a cat lover and gave a thumbs-up to this arrangement). The morning after her first studio sleep-over, she had a couple of powder-blue paws, but she seems to have decided that wet paint is yucky and it hasn’t happened again.