What medieval manuscripts teach us about our ancestors’ pets | Hacker News Reader

What medieval manuscripts teach us about our ancestors’ pets

theconversation.com

49 pointsrntn14 comments

>Their presumed links with paganism and witchcraft meant they were often treated with suspicion.

Unfortunately, one of the most cruel forms [0] of medieval "suspicion"-treating. I will spare the details, here.

The article is quite shallow, the links are a much better read e.g.:

>One European pilgrim who traveled to the Middle East even noted that among the differences between Muslims and Christians was that “They like cats, while we like dogs.[1]

Or those wiki-articles [2],[3].

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat-burning

[1]https://www.medievalists.net/2013/10/why-cats-were-hated-in-...

[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_depictions_of_dogs

[3]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_depictions_of_cats

Savages. Dark Ages, indeed.

Seems it all happened after the Middle Ages, during those so-called rational times of the Renaissance and Enlightenment though.

The Middle Ages have a bad reputation but most horrific things that we now consider medieval behavior happened after it. Witch hunts aren’t really a medieval thing for example. While you had conflicting opinions of course the general opinion of thr Church was that witchcraft was just superstition and not real.

Then it's time to stop calling these times as Renaissance and Enlightenment.

Would it really be productive to rename entire periods of history and cause a confusing rift between documents produced before the name change and after?

This is already a growing norm among academics. "Renaissance" is often now prefixed by a region and refers to art movements. The time period is more often called "Early Modern." Similarly, "Enlightenment" refers to a specific intellectual movement and not a time period when people are being precise.

I'm a bit disappointed which the shallowness of the article. And now mention of the (relatively well known?) cat poem, Pangur Bán?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangur_Bán

If you are interested in cats in Early Medieval Ireland, I would recommend reading "Catṡlechta and other medieval legal material relating to cats" by Kevin Murray in Celtica 25, pp. 143–159.

I don't get the point about cats and dogs being status symbols. I'm sure lower class had dogs for security and cats for rodents. Geting a portrait with a pet is a status symbol because of the portait part, not the pet.

Currently listening to a series of lectures on medieval Britain, and very generally most working people were close to starvation - they couldn't even afford to keep farm animals as the cost to feed them was so high as the field practices at the time were so poor. So while stray dogs and cats may have attached themselves to households or villages, I seriously doubt many except the richer families would have been able to spare the food to feed them and treat them as real pets. And unlikely they would look like the clean attractive pets in the illustrations, if you've met many stray Street cats and dogs.

https://www.europenowjournal.org/2018/09/04/famine-and-deart...

Not to mention they'd get eaten by the poor

This article ended entirely too quickly. I was enjoying the displays of medieval cats in domestic situations. Interesting bit of history.

For an article about pets, it’s 95% about cats. I was hoping for creatures less mundane.

There's a bunch of old manuscripts and scrolls on some boring topic, but a few have a cat footprint in ink on them, so some monk somewhere was working and had a mischievous cat around.

I think there are examples from all over including Spain.

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