Hidden 15th-Century Text On Medieval Manuscripts – Discovered By Students

Conny Waters – MessageToEagle.com – In medieval times, it was very expensive to make parchments, so leaves were regularly scraped or erased and re-used over and over again. In the process, many valuable writings were lost.

Now, students from Rochester Institute of Technology have managed to decipher the lost text on 15th-century manuscript sheets using ultraviolet-fluorescence imaging.

By using ultraviolet-fluorescence imaging, RIT students revealed that a 15th-century manuscript leaf held in RIT’s Cary Graphic Arts Collection was actually a palimpsest, a manuscript on parchment with multiple layers of writing. The image on the left shows the document as it appears in visible light, while the image on the right was produced by the student-built imaging system. Credit: Rochester Institute of Technology

While the erased text is invisible to the naked eye, the chemical signature of the initial writing can sometimes be detected using other areas of the light spectrum.

“Using our system, we borrowed several parchments from the Cary Collection here at RIT and when we put one of them under the UV light, it showed this amazing dark French cursive underneath,” said Zoë LaLena, a second-year imaging science student from Fairport, N.Y., who worked on the project.

“This was amazing because this document has been in the Cary Collection for about a decade now and no one noticed. And because it’s also from the Ege Collection, in which there are 30 other known pages from this book, it’s really fascinating that the 29 other pages we know the location of having the potential to also be palimpsests.”

The imaging system was originally built by 19 students enrolled in the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science’s Innovative Freshman Experience, a yearlong, project-based course that has the imaging science, motion picture science, and photographic sciences programs combine their talents to solve a problem.

A multidisciplinary team of students, Including Lisa Enochs, left, created the imaging system for their Innovative Freshman Experience class. The team started the project last fall before RIT switched to remote instruction in March 2020. Image credit: Gabrielle Plucknette-DeVito

However, when RIT switched to remote instruction in March due to the COVID-19 outbreak, the students were not able to continue with their project. Fortunately, the group received funding to finish the work.

“The students have supplied incredibly important information about at least two of our manuscript leaves here in the collection and in a sense have discovered two texts that we didn’t know were in the collection,” said Steven Galbraith, curator of the Cary Graphic Arts Collection.

“Now we have to figure out what those texts are and that’s the power of spectral imaging in cultural institutions. To fully understand our own collections, we need to know the depth of our collections, and imaging science helps reveal all of that to us.”

The students are interested to see if more manuscript leaves from Ege collections across the country are palimpsests. They imaged another Ege Collection leaf at the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library that turned out to be a palimpsest and are reaching out to other curators across the country. As they begin stitching the lost text back together, paleographers can examine the information they contain.

Written by Conny Waters – MessageToEagle.com – AncientPages.com Staff Writer