By Michael Lyjak
Medieval European images do not support one universal story in which cats were simply feared. Surviving manuscripts show cats as companions, hunters, comic figures and participants in moral or imaginative scenes. Some books even preserve the marks of actual feline visitors. Those examples do not erase hostile beliefs, but they make a single, uninterrupted story of suspicion too narrow.
For anyone meeting medieval cats through Halloween history, the useful starting point is a particular image in a particular book, rather than an assumption about an entire age.
A cat interrupts the spinning
The British Library's discussion of medieval cat images includes a detail from the Maastricht Hours: a nun spins thread while a cat plays with the spindle. The library identifies the manuscript as Stowe MS 17 and the page as folio 34r.
The scene gives the animal something familiar to do. It is interested in an object moving near a person at work. There is no need to turn that action into a coded accusation of witchcraft.
Yet the image should not be mistaken for a snapshot of a named nun's afternoon. A miniature is a constructed representation. What it establishes is that an artist and a book could give a cat this kind of playful, domestic role. It does not tell us how every religious household treated animals.
Mice can turn the tables
The same library article identifies an English Book of Hours, Harley MS 6563, dated around 1320–1330, with mice laying siege to a castle defended by a cat. This is a different use of the animal entirely: a conflict between familiar creatures becomes an imaginative scene.
Read it as a picture before imposing the Halloween cat. Who is attacking? Who is defending? How has the expected relationship between hunter and prey changed? These details make the scene distinctive.
A fantastic image is evidence of an imaginative tradition, not evidence that the event happened. Its humor also warns against interpreting every unusual medieval cat as a feared supernatural creature.
Companionship appears in the writing too
In another British Library account, Dr Gillian Kenny describes cats in the lives of scholars and religious communities. She discusses the ninth-century poem about Pangur Bán and the early thirteenth-century Ancrene Riwle, which allowed a cat as a companion for an anchoress.
A literary cat and a rule about keeping an animal are different kinds of evidence. Together, they make room for affection and ordinary coexistence alongside symbolism.
The point is not to replace a wholly hostile Middle Ages with a wholly affectionate one. These examples show that the relationship was capable of several meanings. A cat could be valued for its company or hunting without losing its usefulness to a writer as a metaphor.
The animal that walked across the page
The Walters Art Museum's Paws on Parchment exhibition account describes cat pawprints in a Flemish manuscript made in the 1470s. Unlike an artist's painted cat, these marks record physical contact with the book while the ink was drying.
That makes the object especially evocative. The print belongs to an animal's passage, although it does not reveal the cat's name, ownership or motives. Calling the cat a mischievous assistant would be a charming invention, not something established by the marks.
The museum also explains cats' practical importance as hunters and their symbolic roles. The exhibition ran from August 2025 to February 2026; its online discussion remains a source for the objects, rather than a notice of an exhibition currently open.
Domestic context changes an image's meaning
A Bangor University article by medieval literature researcher Madeleine S. Killacky considers cats in household imagery. One example is Pietro Lorenzetti's Last Supper of 1320, where a cat near the fire helps establish a domestic setting.
That reading asks us to look at what the cat is doing within the composition. It does not isolate the animal and assume the same symbolism wherever it appears.
This is the limitation of a sweeping Halloween origin story: once the cat has been assigned one meaning, other evidence becomes difficult to see. Specific objects offer a better route. A spinning scene, a comic siege and a paw-marked book do not tell the same story.
Our overview of Halloween's black cat separates these wider relationships from the later seasonal image. Medieval cats deserve that wider view.
The featured scene is an original editorial reconstruction, not a reproduction of a medieval manuscript.
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