Turning my PhD into a picture book

 

From the moment I started studying medieval horse training, during my Master's degree at the Paris-Sorbonne University, I wanted to make the information I was finding available in a fun, creative way. The idea of creating a picture book out of it came to me quite quickly, but I wasn't quite sure how to do so. What story was I trying to to tell? How should I be telling it? 

At the beginning of this year, I revisited this idea, prompted by the fact that I was reaching the end of my PhD and that I needed another project to distract myself. Once again, I wanted to turn my research into a picture book.

At first, I thought about creating a simplified version of the text I was studying, Jordanus Rufus's De medicina equorum (c. 1250, and illustrating it. I wrote a script for it, but was not quite satisfied with it. Yes, it was informative, but it lacked something. It was too dry, too factual: it wasn't the story I would have wanted to read when I was a young girl, interested in the Middle Ages and passionate about horses. 

It was then that I thought that, since the whole point of my PhD was to put the horse at the centre of his/her own history, this is also what my picture book would do, so I described medieval horse-training from the point of view of a young horse. I called him "Moscat" which is an Occitan (the language spoken in the South of France at the time) word to describe a spotted horses, and used the information I had found in various manuscript I had been studying to recreate what might have been his experienced, being captured, tamed, and trained. 

I then made a series of illustrations. Though I tried to get the historical facts right, I did take some liberties, but hopefully this story still conveys the essence of how horses may have been trained in the Middle ages. It was a project I really enjoyed doing. I had been thinking about it for so long that it was very satisfying to see it come to life. 

If you are interested in reading this book, you can find it here.