Transcription
A drawing of a naked person being dragged away by a green demon; the drawing is surrounded by a border with various drawn mussels and clams. The caption reads “Monk 1: What are you drawing? Monk 2: A poor soul being dragged to hell by demons. Monk 1: Cool! And what are you planning to use as a border? Monk 2: I’m thinking freshwater mussels. Monk 1: That’s really perfect.”
Middle-ages cloistered monks really had a lot of time on their hands and no other entertainment, so yeah, crazy art of whatever comes to mind.
Weren’t they also often chained to the desks to meet their deadlines tbf?
The first thing that comes up on a websearch is books being chained to desks, to keep them from getting borrowed. I can’t imagine monks chained to their desks will be motivated to do good work, let alone fine art like illumination. Especially if they’re under a deadline, which would serve to propagate errors and misspellings.