1/13/2024 0 Comments Modern medieval manuscriptsHandwritten manuscripts were manually copied and that frequently caused changes in the text, which is why two copies of one text are almost never the same. Secondly, it will provide scholars with more information about variant readings. The fragment itself may only consist of a few words or lines of text, but it does tell us that this work was known in a certain region at a certain time. First of all, this vast amount of fragments contains valuable information about transmission of medieval texts. There are three important reasons why this research matters. Investigating fragments in a systematic way will allow scholars to explore a new type of research. We estimate that one in every five early-modern books has fragments of medieval manuscripts in its bookbinding. In this article we present a non-destructive scanning technique to uncover this hidden library. As a result, at present there are thousands of manuscript pages hidden in post-medieval bookbindings. This material was strong and thus ideal for supporting the bookbinding of printed books. These so-called “fragments” were usually cut from parchment books. Equally many died a different death: their pages were cut out and recycled by bookbinders. Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, many thousands were boiled down for the production of glue. As Europe started to read the printed counterparts, handwritten books lost their value and many of them were destroyed. 1450 made the handwritten medieval book-or “manuscript”-obsolete. The invention of the printing press in c. Nonetheless, this experiment shows that the macro-XRF technique is extremely suitable for visualizing fragments of medieval manuscripts in a non-destructive way in order to read, date and localize them. In order to systematically employ macro-XRF for researching medieval fragments, the scanning time needs to be decreased. The main limitation of the current set-up is the scanning time, which took anywhere between 6 and 66 h. In addition, we were able to separately visualize the lower and upper text of a famous palimpsest. One of the findings was an early twelfth-century excerpt of a text by the Venerable Bede in a sixteenth-century bookbinding. We were able to visualize hidden texts underneath black paint, paper and parchment at such a high resolution that they could be read and dated. ![]() Four case studies were scanned with a Bruker M6 Jetstream mobile XRF scanner. Systematically investigating these fragments will provide scholars with valuable information about transmission and variant readings of medieval texts. One in roughly every five early-modern books contains a fragment of a medieval manuscript hidden underneath the bookbinding. ![]() The invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century made manuscripts obsolete and bookbinders started recycling their strong parchment leaves to reinforce bindings of printed books. This experiment demonstrates the large potential of macro-XRF imaging for the visualization of fragments of medieval manuscripts hidden in early–modern bookbindings.
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