Holy shit, can you imagine if mediaeval monks had figured out flipbooks?
Brother Francis, absolutely lost in that sweet sweet grape sauce and making his manuscript go fwpfwpfwpfwpfwp: The Snails With Old Man Faces Must Duel
Oh this is one heck of an art prompt
alright, so i made it into a pixel animation -
It wasn’t a matter of figuring it out, medieval people were well aware of the concept of sequential images, such as those that appear in the Sigenot.
It was more a matter of cost. It took approximately 200-300 hides to make a book.
In 14th century England, for example, a sheep cost approximately 1 shilling, five pence. A medieval wage was about 2 pounds a year.
At 20 shillings a pound, your flipbook would cost you 5-8 years wages.
Not counting ink or expensive metallics if you wanted it illuminated.
okay but some scribes were already using that stuff to draw other decorative things (like the aforementioned snails) in the margins of books they were creating as part of their job.
if you draw things like snails and knights on every page, how much harder would it be to have a few of them in the corner make an animation?
idk, i feel like this probably must have happened at least a few times, unless there is something else that would prevent it (e.g. vellum didn’t flip that well, or maybe books never actually got marginalia on enough of the pages to manage this)
