Paws on Parchment at the Walters Art Museum

Cat lovers unite! The Walters is celebrating our feline friends with this paws-itively adorable exhibition. Paws on Parchment explores how medieval people thought about, engaged with, and admired cats through the animals’ presence in manuscripts from the period. Centuries before cat memes took over the internet, the antics of fanciful felines were already popular in the margins of medieval manuscripts. These furry animals delighted readers back then just as they amuse us today.

In Paws on Parchment, visitors will enjoy medieval depictions of cats preserved in the pages of manuscripts from across the world, including a 15th-century “keyboard cat.” Most notably, visitors can see real pawprints left by a cat walking across the pages of a Flemish manuscript as the ink dried in the 1470s. A handful of these “pawprint” manuscripts are known around the world, and this is the first time the Walters’ example will ever be shown.