Sometimes people* say to me, “Carl, why always the pictures of trumpets coming out of the asses? Why always the penises that land in the treetops and the vaginas that wear hats? Do you never have the pretty pictures for us? One thousand years of history and you have only the pooping and the sex pictures?”
And that’s a fair point. So, here’s a change of pace. No sex, no violence, no goose-molesting foxes. Just a completely harmless picture of a cat and a monkey sharing a bowl of milk.
I’ve actually been meaning to post this one for a while now, but I no longer have any idea where I got it, and I don’t like posting things I can’t cite.** I’ve got a hunch it’s from the same manuscript as the monkey with a cannon that’s been sitting in my blog’s title bar for nearly a year now (Bodleian MS Canon. Liturg. 283), but for whatever reason I can’t seem to find the right leaf again. If that’s not it, and I had to guess, I’d say mid-to-late fifteenth century French, probably a book of hours.
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*Full disclosure: the people referred to in this sentence are imaginary. And apparently played by Sacha Baron Cohen.
**But I’m pretty busy this week, and the less I know about it, the less I have to write about it, right?