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These Medieval Doodles Might Be The Coolest Thing Ever

It turns out boredom really is eternal.

Raise your hand if you've ever doodled mindlessly in a notebook.

It turns out that you doodlers are in good company, and that people in medieval times couldn't resist drawing in the blank spaces in their books either.

English professor Erik Kwakkel has encountered dozens of incredible margin doodles in the course of his work, and has begun to share them on his blog.

Kwakkel is an English professor at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, and focuses on medieval manuscripts.

Most of the books he looks at are hand-lettered from between the 13th and 15th century. The doodles were often made decades or even centuries later.

Most doodles, he told BuzzFeed Life, "were the result of testing the pen. The nib of the quill needed cutting from time to time."

"It is very different from our modern urge to draw when we are bored or are holding on the phone," he said.

Still, some of the results are strikingly similar to the kinds of doodles we draw today — like these funny repeating faces.

This melancholic man.

A little guy holding a flower.

Or this tiny dog drawing.

Kwakkel says we should look at the doodles as a small glimpse into the worlds of long-gone writers.

"We have just started to scratch the surface as far as medieval doodles go," he added. "Imagine what we will find if we start to look for them systematically!"

So get back to your doodling, because they might make history one day.