nunc loqui de felibus volo

Salve omnes!

Now that Easter is over (and recovering from the plague), normality shall return to Ego Scriba.  If you can call posting the strange life of rabbits in old manuscripts normal.  I will be bringing you more of the gospel project as well as the prayer book.  Work has slowed down a little as I am running very short of gold.  However today I don't wish to talk about that or even rabbits. I wish to talk about cats!  That's right cats.  Something I have noticed in manuscripts, we have dogs pretending to be bishops, rabbits killing everyone and anything, but then we have the cats.  So what do cats do? Do they kill people? Do they go around pretending to be priests? No.  Even more strange than this, cats are just....cats.  They do cat things. Although when taken into context with the rest of the animals I have seen, this is completely weird.

Cats seem to get a really fair representation in manuscripts.  A lot of the time they are shown hunting mice and rats, often always in a very cat like way.

Sometimes not so cat like:

But generally they are either shown in play or they are shown as friendly companions.  Doing things that every cat owner will have seen:

That is one large cat!

Here's one climbing the boarder of the manuscript.

Probably the most unrealistic cat in medieval art.  I don't know of any cat that willingly goes into water:

We even see them in the background in some illuminations of key events in scripture if you look hard enough:

However.......then the 16th century came, and things got a little weird.

ROCKET POWERED CATS!....and pigeons.  Clearly, the 16th century decided cats needed an upgrade.  It wasn't enough that they can climb up anything or go crazy at random times in the middle of the night.  No! The 16th century clearly thought that the cat needed to be rocket powered.  Probably in response to the new rocket powered pigeons.  I mean how else is the cat supposed to compete?  Birds had rockets, so therefore cats clearly needed them as well. 

I have to confess, the idea of a rocket strapped to the back of a cat is far more amusing than psychopathic rabbits.  The tinfoil hat half of me wondered if this is a lost technology from the 16th century that proved too apocalyptic to keep, who knows!

Well that's all I have to say about cats at the moment.  However it wouldn't be right if rabbits did not get some attention.  So here we go:

Valete!