Archive of medieval books and manuscripts discovered in Romanian church

https://www.medievalists.net/2022/09/medieval-books-manuscripts-discovered-romania/

by quakeguy • 3 years ago

212 69 3 years ago

ggm• 3 years ago

How exciting to find hoarded/forgotten texts in an age when non destructive palimpsest analysis through modern imaging techniques has improved leaps and bounds.

Who knows what lies underneath the top layers of usage?

Texts were copied laboriously by hand. Each one carrys stories of where it came from. It could inform trade links from monastic scribe houses across the globe. It could have DNA fragments of value.

It almost certainly has pictures of cats in it, somewhere. Doing strange things with snails.

IG_Semmelweiss2• 3 years ago

Can I ask about your reference to cats and snails?

zimbu668• 3 years ago

Can't speak for OP, but I've heard snails are a recurring theme in medieval manuscripts: https://justhistoryposts.com/2017/11/13/medieval-marginalia-...

zubiaur• 3 years ago

For your amusement: https://twitter.com/WeirdMedieval https://twitter.com/WeirdMedieval/status/1653758543244279808

dbtc• 3 years ago

And the writing itself might be of interest ;)

primitivesuave• 3 years ago

Imagine finding an ancient/medieval text discussing evolution by natural selection, the indivisible nature of the atom, heliocentricity, and the existence of a unified theory of physics, all written by an author who lived in the 1st century BCE. Such was the discovery of 15th century manuscript collector Poggio Bracciolini, who discovered a surviving copy of De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things [1]) in a Benedictine monastery. The lost work of Lucretius inspired many Enlightenment thinkers and led people to challenge the orthodoxies of that time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_rerum_natura

tomcam• 3 years ago

I was with you until the last sentence, and then I got lost

nickpp• 3 years ago

I love smoky old churches. Sadly so many of them (especially in off-the-beaten-path places) were constructed with wood and various accidents (candles, short-circuits) burned them to the ground. Not the same even if fully reconstructed...

nunobrito4• 3 years ago

In my home town many churches from the 11th century to the 16th century got razed to the ground to build theaters or converted into shopping malls by liberals in the 18th century.

It was done in the name of rationality since religion does not exist for them, meant to free the people from gods. As end result, those theaters were private and got abandoned.

Those shopping malls are now the new churches of a society that now instead of worshiping a god in heavens is worshiping the god of money. It would have been saner to respect old churches and preserve our patrimony/cultural heritage.

prox• 3 years ago

Is this Paris? Only city I could think of with your description. Because there were no shopping malls in the 18th century. The precursor to shopping malls were bazaars which are very old. So that part of your comment seems not chronologically and terminology accurate.

digikazi• 3 years ago

I do as well, which is why when I went to Athens for two weeks last September, I very much looked forward to lots of smoky old orthodox churches. Alas, it wasn't to be: the vast majority of churches I saw looked brand new and as if they had been designed by MacDonald's. Clearly the church has money - and the imagination/vision of petty shopkeepers.

riffraff• 3 years ago

AFAIU most big churches in Athens were converted to mosques during the ottoman empire, and then they were destroyed rather than being converted back.

The only ones that survived are the small ones which were never converted, and which you can still find around the city.

petre2• 3 years ago

Some of the old Saxon fortified churches, like Biertan for instance are in the Unesco heritage fund. There is also one in Viscri where King Charles is expected to visit in two weeks or so. He has a holiday home there and it seems that he has quite enjoyed the place for some time. Of course everything is fully booked now. The authorities have recently closed the village to motor vehicles, in order to protect it and preserve its beauty. You could visit if you ever get the chance. I think the last week of July or the first week of August is the Haferland Week¹ in the area, if you also want to get a taste of local traditions. In Biertan there was a horror movie film festival in August, called Full Moon, but it was paused, then delayed due to the pandemic. Valea Viilor has a other Unesco fortified church that is lesser known but no less spectacular. It's close to Medias, where the manuscripts were found. The other places that are not in the heritage fund are rather sleepy and you have to go on a quest for the keeper of the keys to the church. We had a week long summer project to photograph these churches in 2004.

1. https://haferland.ro/en/the-haferland-week/

listenfaster• 3 years ago

Exciting to see so much music notation in one of the shots in the article. Maybe we’ll hear something from someone undiscovered?

luxuryballs3• 3 years ago

I collect old books and I am drooling right now. My oldest are only 1860s.

dhosek3• 3 years ago

My oldest book dates to the 18th century. It’s not my most valuable book (I’m not sure which is, but my guess would be the signed limited edition of Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote would be it).

I keep the valuable books on a special shelf so that after I die, my kids will know that those books should probably not be sent to the library book sale.

phillc73• 3 years ago

Also love old books. I have a first edition (1791) copy of Introduction to a General Stud Book[1]. That’d be my oldest.

Also love old maps.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Stud_Book

IG_Semmelweiss2• 3 years ago

Do you do anything special to preserve them?

Does your local weather cooperate or hinder your collection ?

luxuryballs3• 3 years ago

Nope, no different from safely keeping any other books, but I might if I had even older ones depending on their condition.

WalterBright6• 3 years ago

I have a Bible from 1800 or so, and a couple others from 1870 or so. I store them in the comic book archival bags, and keep them in a part of the house that says at a constant temperature.

dailyplanet• 3 years ago

The next step would be digitizing the books and manuscripts so scholars can collectively research the finding.

https://www.medievalists.net/?s=digitizing&submit=Search

I wonder what the cost of this digitization process would be and what research labs can render this service.

voynich• 3 years ago

I was just thinking about that. In my opinion, this find is sorta useless if these aren't digitalized and shared publicly.

To my knowledge, digitalization can be expensive, because they need hardware for high quality scans, and they have to be careful not to damage these books any further. I guess it all depends on the situation.

Avicebron• 3 years ago

apropo username, having taken a crack at pulling relevant information out of scanned documents I agree that scan quality is very important (while often lengthy and expensive) especially if someone is trying to derive meaningful information from a digital copy without the physical copy to do a comparison with.

And from the look of the picture those books are massive and probably very delicate.

EDIT: to add a bit to the expensive part of this, it's expensive even with the willingness and resources to get it done, it's hard but unfortunately to even convince someone to dedicate these resources is a hurdle.

foobarian• 3 years ago

I'm wondering the other side of it: given how fragile digital storage and peripherals are, are there efforts to transcribe books like this onto archival paper with archival inks? Seems it really would be kinda fun to have a modern day monastery copying books by hand like in the ancient times...

giraffe_lady2• 3 years ago

I'm not sure how common they are or precisely where it came from but I know someone with a hand-copied prayer book from the indian melankara church. I'm not sure when the original was made but this one was copied in the 1960s so is nearly a minor relic in its own right.

WalterBright6• 3 years ago

given how fragile digital storage and peripherals are

Post it on the web. Lots of people will inevitably make copies, ensuring its survival.

WalterBright6• 3 years ago

Your phone camera, hand held, is plenty good enough to digitize each page. Even if they don't lay flat. You could pay a student to just photograph each page. The cost is minimal.

Before anyone says "this will never work! It must be done by $$$$$ professionals! It requires $$$$ equipment!" just pick a book, any book, off your bookshelf, open it up, and take a phone photo.

P.S. It works better with daylight providing enough light through the windows.

joshuahedlund• 3 years ago

You make a good point, but there also could be more to it than that:

- Need to make sure the photographers are careful not to damage fragile pages

- Need a system of organization (syncing ten thousand default-named iphone pics with no labels is not ideal)

- You might be ignoring important differences between modern published books on your bookshelf and these materials (ex. maybe font is not same size, maybe font is not modern English, maybe characters are not printed consistently, maybe pages are dirty, all of which could impact OCR-friendliness of an iphone pic compared to something else

- There might even be valuable information in markings below the topmost visible layer which could be revealed by scanning equipment (especially for example if pages are stuck together)

And that's just off the top of my head, without real domain knowledge.

adhesive_wombat• 3 years ago

Scantailor Advanced will also help process the images into something resembling a readable scan.

But indeed, as long as you have some images you can dump then onto the Internet Archive for immediate posterity (and hope they don't go under when the lawsuit determines a penalty).

aizyuval• 3 years ago

It’s so refreshing to be reminded that history is still lying around us, waiting to be found. Waiting for the right folks.

hutzlibu• 3 years ago

So is the future ...

kmote00• 3 years ago

Speaking as one who grew up on the West Coast of the U.S., in towns where the oldest buildings are rarely measured in more than decades, I'm quite envious of those of you who live in places where civilization has been active for hundreds or thousands of years!

giraffe_lady2• 3 years ago

oh... buddy....

nwatson• 3 years ago

https://www.britannica.com/technology/cliff-dwelling

pvitz• 3 years ago

It is a pity that Aristotle's second book of "Poetics" doesn't seem to be among the books found there.

COGlory• 3 years ago

The last known copy of that burned with a Benedictine monastary in the 14th century

jq-r• 3 years ago

Nice reference, "The Name of The Rose" is my favourite book. A masterpiece.

nologic01• 3 years ago

Coincidentally on other news today people in Emilia Romana are rushing to salvage old books stored in the basements of flooded churches.

petre2• 3 years ago

Whoever hid the maniscripts into the tower knew what they were doing, right? Saxons are very practical minded people. Their fortified church towers have a room for storing bacon, so if they had to take refuge in the fortified church, they also had a supply of food on hand to survive. Romanians by contrast would take refuge in the forest and rebuild everything after it was destroyed by the invaders. That's why some of their homes, barns and stables are improvised to a certain degree, because the mindset that they're going to be destroyed anyway is still present in the collective unconscious.

This discovery is very exciting. The manuscripts pictured in the article look like music partitures.

xhevahir• 3 years ago

When I saw "Romanian" I figured the medieval texts were Byzantine and therefore might contain ancient Greek fragments. Since the library belonged instead to Transylvanian Saxons, that's probably not the case.

Archive of medieval books and manuscripts discovered in Romanian church

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