No Matter the Century, Kitty is Kitty
What We Get From A Little Visitor
Once upon a time, on March 11, 1445, in a place far from me, Dubrovnic, Croatia, a clerk was writing a report from some merchants in Kosovo about the silver that they were mining. His boss wanted to know how the digging was going and similar.
The clerk hunched over his work, pen poised over the parchment, checking the writing one last time for mistakes.
And then something soft rubbed against his wrist.
Before he could stop him, the official mouser for the town hall had jumped into the ink and scampered across the open ledger, leaving four indelible paw prints across his report.
Centuries later, a historian by the name of Emir O. Filipovic was reading the ledger, preparing to put the words into a digital format. When he spotted the paw prints, he chuckled, took a picture, and shared it around the internet.
Thus, was the mouser of Dubrovnic immortalized forever.
We will probably never know what the cat looked like or how he got into the ink. Maybe the clerk had knocked some over and was trying to clean it up before it soaked the ledgers- maybe that is how the cat reached the ledger in the first place. All we know is that the report was written, and the clerk didn’t want to bother re-writing it after the cat got on it. Actually, I’m just guessing the cat was the official mouser of the building. He might have been the clerk’s pet, for all I know, or a stray that snaked his way into the building on a blustery March evening looking for somewhere warm to sleep.
But we do know that it was the move to digitize the ledgers for later use that brought us these prints.
And that’s what this really is about: what we gain and what we lose as we move information from one format to another. Preserving the numbers and reports from centuries ago allows historians to read them and analyze them at their leisure. Raw data about mining in Croatia will last for another couple of centuries to be wrought into erudite essays on Eastern European economics. Or maybe our descendants will follow their clues to new silver mines that they will strip for industrial use.
But what do we lose? What moments of personality, what testaments to cats’ boundless love of sitting on our writing implements, what reminders of the interconnected webs of animals our societies are, are lost?
The presence of a cat’s prints tells us that they must have been prolific in that city. That they could get into a building suggests that, at the least, the front door was left open, though I’m willing to bet on a regular clowder insinuating their way into hallways. Cats more or less agree to hang out with us- what attracted this one to the building? Are clerks messy eaters, leaving chunks of meat pies around their desks?
And we wouldn’t have the chance to ask if no one had gone back and handled the original parchment document.
Sources:
A Medieval Cat’s Paw Print: How a Mischievous Feline Made its Mark on History — Medievalists.net