Paintings with snail battles: This medieval riddle is still full of mysteries
For a brief period in the late 13th century, a new obsession swept across Europe's illuminators - the craftsmen who decorated books - snail battles.
They can be seen on many pages of ancient tomes. The main plot is about a knight in full armour fighting a giant slug that attacked him. The mystery of these drawings is still not solved, the BBC reports.
"They have caused great bewilderment among art historians and book scholars who could not understand what they mean," says Kenneth Clarke, a senior lecturer in medieval literature at the University of York in the UK.
Snails were depicted in various situations, but the main plot of the drawings was the confrontation between an attacking snail and a knight. Often, the mollusks' antennae - technically, their upper tentacles or ommatophores - are aggressively pointed forward, like swords. In one of the images, a snail is fighting a naked woman. A few drawings even depicted snail-human hybrids riding rabbits.
Over time, the battle snails even began to spread beyond books to cathedrals, where they were carved on facades or on seats.
Over the years, there have been many attempts to explain this phenomenon: including the idea that snail fights symbolize the struggle between the upper and lower classes, or even resurrection.
One of the leading ideas is that the knights depicted fighting snails symbolized cowardice, and the placement of these drawings alongside religious texts was meant to be satirical.