A snail wielding a sword, battling a knight; elephants the size of oversized golden retrievers; dogs with disproportionate features and vacant stares; and cats dressed in clothes, playing musical instruments—these treasures of medieval animal illustrations are causing a stir on the internet.
Read Also...:
The 'wildly passionate' work of bestselling Australian poet Dorothy Porter celebrated in memoir
03-20, 2025
Bob Trevino Likes It is the remarkable story of a mistaken Facebook friend request, and the healing it gave
03-20, 2025
Wanda Gibson wins $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature with picture book Three Dresses
03-20, 2025
Two new plays show disability representation is improving but theatre still has a long way to go
03-20, 2025From lists of "super ugly medieval dogs" to Instagram accounts dedicated to "weird medieval people," people can't seem to get enough of these images, and the weirder, the better. Matthew Ponesse, an associate professor of history at Ohio Dominican University, knows this well, as he runs a medieval meme account on Instagram, @medievalistmatt, with over 160,000 followers.
Dr. Ponesse says that animal imagery is a "tried and true tactic" on his Instagram account. He recalls that when he first started the account in 2018, it was simply to connect with students. Students followed him out of pity, thinking he was "trying hard," but he never intended to create any non-historical or educational content.
But he soon realized that even memes unrelated to his area of expertise—early medieval literature—could capture students' attention. He found that social media was a form of escape and recreation, and students clearly didn't want to be burdened with academic content there. So, he began to challenge himself, giving himself an hour to stare at images, waiting for inspiration to strike, and most of the content was "very absurd and silly."
The account's follower growth was slow until it "completely exploded" last year. Dr. Ponesse believes that this medium and content resonate with modern audiences. "It surprises me how medieval history has been able to become so mainstream," he says. And animals seem to be key. "If I want to post something that's definitely going to be popular and widely shared, animals are an easy choice."
So, how did these artworks go from niche historical archives to Instagram? Why do they seem so strange to us today? And where did these images come from? The Middle Ages, also known as the medieval period, is generally considered to span roughly 1000 years, from the 5th century AD to the beginning of the Renaissance in the 15th century.
Most of the animal imagery that has entered the mainstream comes from Western European manuscripts, often appearing as marginalia: small illustrations around the borders of the text. Larisa Grollemond, associate curator of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts at the Getty Museum, explains that in that period, books were made for the "medieval 1%." They were created for truly elite readers. A nobleman of high status might own a small number of religious texts, including books to guide personal prayer—you'd see a lot of interesting animals and marginalia there. In addition, there were secular books, such as romances, histories, and in some cases, music.
The artists of the marginalia—known as illuminators—included both monks and secular artisans from professional workshops. Dr. Grollemond says that the purpose of marginalia has long been debated by medieval art historians. Some say they are satirical, some say they illustrate the ideas of the manuscript, and some say they are purely for fun. "Medieval people were still people, they had a sense of humor. They found a lot of the same things we find funny to be funny," Dr. Grollemond says. "Medieval people loved poop jokes, fart jokes, just like we do. It turns out that's an element of human humor that hasn't gone away over the centuries."
The medieval fascination with animals stemmed from the way people lived during this period, says Julia Perratore, associate curator in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Medieval Art and The Cloisters department. "The way people lived alongside animals was different than we do," she says. "The vast majority of people lived in the countryside and worked the land, which meant working alongside livestock. People were generally in closer physical proximity to animals. It wasn't uncommon for the human residents of a house to live upstairs and the animal residents to live downstairs, because the more you could keep bodies together for warmth, the happier you were going to be."
As a result, animals appeared in "any context where art might be made," from wall paintings and carved doorways to clothing and heraldry. But why do these animals look… like that? It's no secret that medieval animal paintings don't exactly resemble real-life animals. In fact, that's the subject of most viral memes on the topic. But Dr. Grollemond explains that this wasn't due to a lack of skill on the part of the artists, but rather a stylistic choice. "Medieval artists weren't trying to accurately depict animals," she says. "They weren't trying to do photorealism. They were trying to convey certain messages about the world around them through their depictions of animals."
Dr. Perratore points to a fresco located at the Met Cloisters. Painted on the wall of a 12th-century Spanish hermitage, it features a depiction of a camel using flat forms, stylized lines, and bold colors. "[The artist] is using the stylistic language of the time," she says. "I think some people might look at this and say it's very simple, or that whoever made it didn't have skill. I think they're actually very skilled. They're using it creatively. They're doing their own thing." Dr. Perratore says that the artist behind this camel created "a very dynamic form, but they're doing it in their own way."
This creative license is even more apparent in depictions of exotic animals. While some medieval courts had menageries where wild animals were kept for display, most artists were unlikely to encounter lions, elephants, or jaguars. Dr. Perratore says it's like a game of "telephone," where the descriptions get further and further from the truth as they're passed along. "It's not that they didn't have skill, it's that they were making artistic choices based on the information that they had," she says. "They weren't trying to be super naturalistic. That wasn't their artistic goal."
Evidence of these medieval artists' creativity is still visible today. Many of the dragons we find in popular culture—for example, in the popular TV series "Game of Thrones"—are based on medieval interpretations. And what about those human-like eyes? That was intentional, too. "I think there was a care among medieval artists and illuminators to make the faces of animals say something, and a lot of that happens in the eyes," Grollemond says. "I think they were in some ways for humor, to make things more striking, but especially in cases where the animal represents a moral exemplar, you're supposed to see yourself in the animal."
This is especially true for animals depicted in bestiaries: medieval encyclopedias of real and imaginary creatures, filled with Christian theology. "[Artists] were using animals as examples for Christian lessons and essentially teaching Christian theology, so all the animals are imbued with specific behaviors or characteristics given to them by God," Grollemond says. Creatures like tigers, stags, pelicans, and leopards—like this leopard from a 13th-century bestiary—were often symbols of Christ. Dr. Perratore points to a collection of Western European fables called "The Romance of Reynard the Fox," which was very popular in the late Middle Ages. "[It] is a great storytelling tradition where animals basically play human social roles," she says. "Animals become a way of telling stories about people, which is universal, but was no less popular in the Middle Ages than it is today." In each Reynard story, the fox is summoned before his animal peers for his misdeeds, but ultimately outwits them with his cunning.
So, what can angry snails, strange cats, and smiling lions teach us? Perhaps the Middle Ages weren't so dark after all. "[We have] 1000 years of history where humans weren't hiding in caves and barbarians weren't ravaging the world. That's not what was happening. What was really happening is we were constantly developing, we were constantly evolving, we were constantly creating," Ponesse says. "This is an era that's supposedly barbaric and backwards and ignorant and intolerant, and yet the way they're depicting animals is sweet and beautiful and playful. We expect it to be dark, but it's so bright and lively and vibrant."
While Dr. Ponesse says art historians might "roll their eyes" at his memes, both Dr. Perratore and Dr. Grollemond are fans of his Instagram account. "The sheer amount of invention that we encounter in these memes is really a source of continued joy," Dr. Perratore says. "I think it's important to get people engaged with art from the past, however they encounter it… it really helps to humanize the past." Dr. Grollemond believes that the artists behind these memes would have enjoyed them, too. "I'm a firm believer that medieval people would have loved the internet. I think the repurposing of [their] art would have been very satisfying to illuminators," she says.
Dr. Ponesse has a small paperweight on his desk that he had specially made. It reads a Latin phrase that translates to: "The soul is made young by laughter." "I think the world needs more levity, it needs more joy," he says. "If I can go back to an era that's supposedly so dark and violent, [to] show a brighter side of it, who knows? Maybe it'll get people to reconsider the era that we live in and to see some positive things."
