To "doodle" means to draw or scrawl aimlessly, and the history of the word goes back to the early 20th century. Scribbling haphazard words, squiggly lines and mini-drawings, however, is a much older ...

More than 700 years ago, an anonymous scribe set down the tales of King Arthur and his Round Table in a vellum manuscript. He punctuated the Old French text with 126 miniature illustrations adorned ...

For centuries, the image of a monk hunched over a desk, painstakingly copying manuscripts by candlelight, has dominated our perception of scholarship in the Middle Ages. But what about the women? A ...

Jessica Hodgson, a graduate student at the University of Leicester, was poring over a medieval manuscript in the Bodleian Libraries‘ collection at the University of Oxford when she spotted a faint ...

Every book was a laborious project during the Middle Ages. And according to a first-of-its-kind quantitative review, more than a few of them were penned by women. Experts estimate medieval scribes ...

One of many standout scenes in the 1975 classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail features King Arthur and his knights facing down the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog, a seemingly innocuous bunny who soon ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Conservator Sally Kilby and Błażej Mikuła photograph inside the folds of a medieval manuscript that was used as the cover for ...

Illustration of writer and scribe Christine de Pizan presenting her book to Isabeau of Bavaria, Queen of France, in the early 15th century (illustration via Getty Images) Women contributed more ...

While studying a rare medieval manuscript in Oxford’s Weston Library, PhD student Jessica Hodgkinson noticed something unusual: a series of small, barely visible indentations at the bottom of page 18.

The 15th-century Voynich manuscript has puzzled scholars and confounded attempts to decipher it for centuries. Its 200-odd pages contain dozens of colorful illustrations of plants, astrological ...