Cats have been with us for many years. I am not going to go in to the history of cats other than to say that they have appeared in many medieval scrolls.
Besides their images drawn and painted in scrolls, they have left their mark in other ways. Cats want attention and they will go where their humans are at in order to get said attention. In modern times, they just like to take naps on keyboards, or walk across them, deleting pages, sending unfinished emails, turning on the mic or video cameras in their wake. In medieval times, they have walked across manuscripts with muddy paws or fresh ink on their paws. At their very worst, they have even urinated on a book or two. My daughters cats like to lay down on my laptop and nap or, in this case, lay down on top of my most recent project (a sneak peek).
Luckily for me she had clean paws and didn’t chew on the edges…or spill water or ink on it. Unlike myself who has damaged scrolls by spilling water on them and in one instance, dumping a full bottle of ink on an unfinished scroll.
Cats have left their impression on the medieval world much to the chagrin of their human pets. I guess you could say that this is the equivalent of finding dinosaur foot prints in mud.
I mainly just wanted to post a picture of the cat sitting on my current scroll project but if you want to read more, here is where the pictures came from along with a few other useful sites:
https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2018/12/cats-get-off-the-page.html
And we even have a book on cats in medieval manuscripts:
https://books.google.com/books/about/Cats_in_Medieval_Manuscripts.html?id=bMD2wgEACAAJ
Sir Seved Ribbing, SCA 