Joe Europe’s Top 8 Pieces Of Smutty Medieval Art

 
Commentary

It’s December again, and the world is just as fucked as ever. Possibly slightly more, possibly slightly less. I guess it’s easy to lose track of these things without an ordered list to tell you what to think. Having been precariously perched on the 2015 bar stool for quite some time now, we’ll soon be staring down the menacing barrel of 2016. So how best to celebrate yet another successful orbit around the Sun? 

We thought about publishing an objectively correct ranking of the year’s best records. But sadly we couldn’t get hold of any doof doof scientists to determine what the metrics should be. Instead, we’ve fallen back on our Top 8 Whatevers. You know the score – our trusted team of R$N scribes pitch in with lists of music they’ve enjoyed, petty grievances they want to air, obscure interests they want to highlight. Basically whatever’s on their mind. Let’s do this. Here is Joe Europe to introduce his own Top 8: 

People are people and people have always been people. People are weird, funny and obtuse.  Therefore it stands to reason that people have always been weird, funny, and obtuse. From the early days of humanity to this digital world in which we live we have expressed ourselves, through art, in the most sublime of ways but also the most mundane. I bet 30,000 years ago there was always one in the hunter-gatherer group that made fart jokes and loved bad puns. This also goes for the art of the European middle ages. Imagine that monk, a scribe, stuck in the scriptorium, rain lashing against the window, bored as fuck. What you going to do? Draw a cock in the margin of course.

Here are my top 8 smutty, dirty and downright weird pieces of medieval art and manuscript marginalia..


Fantastical face bird

 

This is from an early incarnation of Animal Hospital:

“What seems to be the matter with your budgie laddie?”

“Um.. he’s made out of human faces Rolf”

 

The fantastical goat bird

 

1247 – the year science went too far. Sadly everyone missed the news due to the onset of the Black Death in western Europe.

 

Hole in one

 

Um….

 

The fantastical wingless, testicle-chinned terror-chicken 

 

Sadly hunted to extinction in the early 1600s, the green woods of England were once inhabited by the wingless, testicle-chinned terror-chicken.

 

Boil in the bag wizards

 

I love the way that daemons often look so affable in these pictures. I also love the guy loading nude Gandalfs into a boiling cauldron.

 

Boiler Room

 

If Boiler Room had taken place in some kind of medieval hell. Well I’ve never been to a Boiler Room so just maybe…

 

How's your father

 

Every good weekend out is followed by a good going over with the anus bellows. Refreshing and revitalising.

The grand finale

 

The crowning glory and my top pick of the weird world of medieval art. Just what the fuck is going on here? Even the dragon in the background has had his face blurred so people can’t recognise him and the weird shit he gets up to at the weekend. Fucks sake.