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You may have seen the news of the recent discovery of a re-used parchment by students at Rochester - @RITtigers
https://www.rit.edu/news/rit-students-discover-hidden-15th-century-text-medieval-manuscripts
Here are some (speculative) thoughts that came to mind
https://www.rit.edu/news/rit-students-discover-hidden-15th-century-text-medieval-manuscripts
Here are some (speculative) thoughts that came to mind
Palimpsests are one of the most exciting / sexy things in manuscript studies: rediscovering a text that has been erased and replaced with another.
Traditionally the most famous European cases have involved mediaeval manuscripts that predated the widespread availability of paper.
Traditionally the most famous European cases have involved mediaeval manuscripts that predated the widespread availability of paper.
Thanks to multispectral filming, a number of cases have recently been brought to light... but the recent Rochester discovery is interesting because it does not fit the trend: it was produced in the 15th century – a time when manuscript production was at an all-time high...
Palimpsests are the result of a laborious process – so why bother doing this in the 15th century? Well, it could be due to cost or to the scarcity of usable parchment – here the nature of erased document gives a clue.
Though little has been made public, the published photo shows that the replaced text was not a valuable classical or theological work in Latin, rather it appears to be an account in French about prisoners and the clergy and is formulated in what seems to be legal phraseology
But why use such high quality vellum for a plain and undecorated text? The hand is 15th century and it was probably created just before the extant manuscript that is dated to 1425 – 1450 by the @FragmentariumMS project (see the reconstituted ms here: https://fragmentarium.ms/overview/F-djs6 )
In other words, it was created during the Hundred Years War at a time of political and military upheaval, but also devastation and economic turmoil that led one historian, Guy Bois, to liken the destruction in one French region to Hiroshima...
In such a situation, perhaps they used whatever materials they had to hand in time of need, rubbing out and reusing the high quality vellum for a more suitable texts - like a book of hours - just a few years later...
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