Think Millennial Humor Is Bizarre? Check These 16th-Century Demonic Doodles

The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel

A grotesque image of an ogre shooting an arrow into another creature’s rear.
A nun plucks penises off a phallus tree.
A bizarre hybrid examining someone else’s hindquarters.
And rabbits conducting a funeral procession.

The Flying Green Penis Monster, from Decretum Gratiani with commentary of Bartolomeo de Brescia

Medieval society wasn’t all about prayers and plagues. The printing press hadn’t been invented yet and the painstaking task of copying line after line of a medieval manuscript was performed by scribes. So how do you spice up the dull task?

The scribes added penis monsters, butts, poop, images of violent rabbits, and lots of vengeful animals in the marginalia of their manuscripts.

The grotesque marginalia aka drolleries became a safe haven for people to mock religious establishments and disagree with the political climate of that era.

During the renaissance, another illustrative book came into the picture— The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel, which chronicles the bizarre dreams of a giant monster Pantagruel, son of Gargantua.

In plain English, Drolactic means “amusing” or “funny”.

This book is speculated to be written by François Rabelais and edited by a Parisian editor Richard Breton. The…