Every so often a history book comes along that is clearly not intended to be treated with great solemnity. Olivia Swarthout’s Weird Medieval Guys: How to Live, Laugh, Love (and Die) in Dark Times is certainly one of them. This is a book populated by murderous rabbits, peculiar saints, questionable medical advice, strange animals, unfortunate lovers and medieval artists who occasionally seem to have been working from descriptions supplied by someone who had heard about an elephant from a bloke in a tavern.

Swarthout is the creator of the Weird Medieval Guys social media accounts, where she has collected and shared some of the stranger images found in medieval manuscripts. The book develops that idea into something considerably more substantial than simply reproducing amusing pictures with captions. Published by Square Peg, the hardback runs to 208 pages and is lavishly illustrated throughout with medieval manuscript images.

The basic conceit is rather clever. Instead of presenting medieval history chronologically, Swarthout invites the reader to imagine actually living in the medieval world. The first major section, The Struggle: Surviving Life, Love and Death, works its way through the problems of existence, including where you might live, what work you might undertake, how you might find love and, inevitably, how you might die. Quizzes, diagrams, maps, flow charts and mock advice turn the whole exercise into something resembling a medieval survival manual.

There is plenty of silliness along the way, but rather more genuine history than the presentation initially suggests. Medieval attitudes towards courtship, marriage, occupations, religion, astrology, saints, death and the natural world all appear, although none receives anything approaching a conventional academic treatment. Swarthout instead slips the information in amongst the jokes. You can therefore discover something about medieval beliefs almost accidentally while trying to determine your medieval occupation or wondering whether your prospective romantic life is going to end particularly badly.

The second half of the book turns towards the medieval bestiary and, for me, this is where things become particularly entertaining. Medieval representations of animals can be wonderfully peculiar because the purpose of the illustrations was not necessarily the naturalistic representation we expect today. Animals carried religious, moral and symbolic meanings, while some artists were attempting to depict creatures that they had never actually seen. Swarthout works through beasts, birds, fish and serpents, drawing heavily upon surviving medieval bestiaries and manuscript illustrations.

The illustrations are consequently the real stars. Some are beautiful, others grotesque and quite a few leave you wondering exactly what the artist thought he was drawing. There are wolves, dragons, basilisks, strange birds, unlikely fish and assorted creatures that appear to have escaped from someone’s nightmare. The famous medieval tendency to depict rabbits behaving badly is also very much at home here. Anyone who has spent time looking through medieval marginalia will already know that monks and manuscript illustrators could produce material considerably stranger than many modern cartoonists.

Behind the jokes, however, lies something rather interesting. Books such as this remind us that medieval people were not simply the grim, mud covered inhabitants of the so called Dark Ages that popular culture sometimes makes them. They laughed, worried about relationships, complained about other people, feared death, told stories and found humour in the absurd. The manuscript illustrations are particularly useful because they provide glimpses into that mental world, even when those glimpses involve armed animals or creatures doing things that probably should not be described over breakfast.

There are limitations. Anyone approaching Weird Medieval Guys expecting a serious general history of medieval Europe is going to be disappointed. There is little sustained political, military, economic or social analysis, and complicated historical subjects are necessarily compressed to fit the humorous format. The geographical and chronological breadth covered by the term medieval also means that material produced centuries apart can sit together because it suits a particular theme. As a result, the reader should be cautious about treating the book as representing a single coherent medieval worldview.

Occasionally the modern humour also threatens to overwhelm the historical context. That is probably unavoidable given that the entire concept grew from social media, where an extraordinary manuscript image accompanied by a clever caption works extremely well. On the printed page I sometimes wanted another paragraph explaining why an image had been produced, who commissioned the manuscript, or what the symbolism meant. Some readers have made essentially the same criticism, arguing that the humour can leave them wanting considerably more historical context.

That criticism needs to be kept in perspective because Swarthout is not pretending to have written an academic history. The research behind the selection is considerable, and medieval literature scholar Madeleine Killacky has particularly noted the extent of Swarthout’s engagement with digitised manuscripts and scholarship. The book is trying to make medieval culture accessible and entertaining, and judged on those terms it succeeds extremely well.

Indeed, I suspect its greatest strength is that somebody with only a passing interest in medieval history could pick it up because of a picture of an homicidal rabbit and emerge two hours later knowing considerably more about medieval life, belief and manuscript culture than they did before. That is not a bad achievement for a book that frequently appears determined not to take itself seriously.

It is also an excellent book simply to browse. You do not need to sit down and read it from beginning to end. Open it almost anywhere and there will be an illustration, strange fact, quiz or piece of medieval advice demanding attention. It is the sort of book that can sit on the coffee table and repeatedly lure you back into reading another few pages.

So is Weird Medieval Guys really a history book? Sort of. It certainly is not a conventional one, nor should it replace a proper history of medieval society. I would describe it instead as an entertaining doorway into medieval history, particularly the strange and wonderful world preserved in illuminated manuscripts. There is genuine historical material underneath the jokes, but Swarthout is quite happy to let the weirdness lead the way.

And perhaps that is exactly the point. Medieval history does not always need another photograph of a castle followed by twenty pages explaining feudalism. Sometimes what is required is a rabbit armed with a sword.

Recommended, particularly for anyone interested in medieval history, manuscript art or the wonderfully bizarre ways in which people have represented their world. It is light, beautifully illustrated, genuinely funny and more informative than its deliberately ridiculous exterior initially suggests. Just do not buy it expecting a new interpretation of the Hundred Years War.

Rating: 4 out of 5 homicidal medieval rabbits.