I'd been looking up some older books for a personal project, and I found a bunch of scanned pages with detailed printed illustrations. I also read references to a law book made for a pope that was "adorned with goat musicians and fox monks". These were the more magical ones — there were some that had some cheeky illustrations that were quite obviously not a doodle or an afterthought.

Any idea why these were customary in medieval books and why they died down (even though printed books are still very much around)?