Mischievous Cats in World History
f you’ve been following the blog this week, you’ve seen our posts on a cat that left its pawprints on a medieval scribe’s work and another that left its mark on a brick made in England during Roman times that ended up in a remote outpost of the Hudson’s Bay Company called Fort Vancouver in Washington State, where it now sits in a museum to be visited by schoolchildren.
I love both of these cat stories, but neither of them is as funny as the duo of anecdotes recorded by Thijs Porck, a lecturer in the Department of English Language and Culture at Universiteit Leiden.
In the first, he recounts the story of a 1420 scribe whose precious work was peed on by one cat and then, the smell being attractive to other cats, many other felines. He had to draw a little picture of a cat and what appear to be hands pointing to the edges of the urine stain.
More: Mischievous Cats in World History, Part 3 - Alexis C. Madrigal - the Atlantic