File:Illustration-monkey-on-hare.jpg

English: It was not a rare phenomenon for a mediaeval manuscript to be illuminated with inappropriate scenes: this was a field where contemporary illuminators and copyists were able to display their abilities “indulging in the feeling of freedom with wild leaps and caprices.” Thus in a contemporary manuscript in the Ambrosiana in Milan we come across animals such as cocks, apes and dogs decorating philosophical works, and it can only have been the spread and popularity of such inappropriate animal figures that made Rabbi Yehudah ben Samuel the Pious of Speyer in Germany deem it necessary in the second half of the 12th century to prescribe that upon the employment of Jewish Bible-copyists it should be made a condition that they abstain from executing the massoretic apparatus in the shape of all sorts of animals and birds, as happened for instance in the famous Bible manuscript in the Karlsruhe County Library, which had once belonged to Johann Reuchlin, where one initially has the impression of seeing a whole menagerie of lions, bears, oxen, sheep and other animals only to realize later, after thorough examination, that all these animals are in fact concealing the massoretic apparatus written in an extremely small microscript.