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Archive of medieval books and manuscripts discovered in Romanian church
- ggm 3y agoHow 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_Semmelweiss 3y agoCan I ask about your reference to cats and snails?
- zimbu668 3y agoCan't speak for OP, but I've heard snails are a recurring theme in medieval manuscripts: https://justhistoryposts.com/2017/11/13/medieval-marginalia-why-are-there-so-many-snails-in-medieval-manuscripts/ https://justhistoryposts.com/2017/11/13/medieval-marginalia-...
- morkalork 3y agoAlso killer rabbits
- Vvector 3y agoFive is right out.
- partomniscient 3y agoNow go away or I shall taunt you a second time.
- zubiaur 3y agoFor your amusement: https://twitter.com/WeirdMedieval https://twitter.com/WeirdMedieval https://twitter.com/WeirdMedieval/status/1653758543244279808 https://twitter.com/WeirdMedieval/status/1653758543244279808
- dbtc 3y agoAnd the writing itself might be of interest ;)
- primitivesuave 3y agoImagine 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_rerum_natura
- tomcam 3y agoI was with you until the last sentence, and then I got lost
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nickpp 3y agoI 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...
- nunobrito 3y agoIn 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 3y agoIs 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.
- fein 3y agoJudging by the name of the parent, I'd say Portugal.
- VK538FY 3y agoThe French revolution took place at the end of the 18th century and I'm sure that a lot of churches in Paris (or any French city) were demolished in a big FU to God. I can't recall something similar having taken place in Portugal at the time. Or anywhere else.
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- listenfaster 3y agoExciting to see so much music notation in one of the shots in the article. Maybe we’ll hear something from someone undiscovered?
- luxuryballs 3y agoI collect old books and I am drooling right now. My oldest are only 1860s.
- dhosek 3y agoMy 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 3y agoAlso 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Stud_Book
- luxuryballs 3y agothat is so cool!! what a find
- dhosek 3y agoI grew up with a Readers Digest atlas¹ which had reproductions of antique maps on its endpapers. Aside from weird distortions of the shapes of continents, it also had Australia as a peninsula extending from Antarctica. I spent a lot of time studying that old map. ⸻ 1. Speaking of old maps, this atlas had such details as Pakistan and Bangladesh as a single country, Vietnam as two countries, and an extensive section on the then-new concept of plate-tectonics including maps showing prehistoric configurations of the continents.
- IG_Semmelweiss 3y agoDo you do anything special to preserve them? Does your local weather cooperate or hinder your collection ?
- dailyplanet 3y agoThe next step would be digitizing the books and manuscripts so scholars can collectively research the finding. https://www.medievalists.net/?s=digitizing&submit=Search 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 3y agoI 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 3y agoapropo 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.
- WalterBright 3y agoAh, baloney. If you can open the book, you can photograph it with your iphone. You'll find the result answers your concerns. Try it with any of your books.
- ben_w 3y agoThat reminds me, I have an out-of-copyright book by a namesake where I took the photos years ago — before I had a smartphone let alone one with built-in OCR — and still have not gotten around to transferring the text to wiki… source? wikibooks? One of them. I should do that.
- aizyuval 3y agoIt’s so refreshing to be reminded that history is still lying around us, waiting to be found. Waiting for the right folks.
- hutzlibu 3y agoSo is the future ...
- kmote00 3y agoSpeaking 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_lady 3y agooh... buddy....
- nwatson 3y agohttps://www.britannica.com/technology/cliff-dwelling https://www.britannica.com/technology/cliff-dwelling
- pvitz 3y agoIt is a pity that Aristotle's second book of "Poetics" doesn't seem to be among the books found there.
- nologic01 3y agoCoincidentally on other news today people in Emilia Romana are rushing to salvage old books stored in the basements of flooded churches.
- petre 3y agoWhoever 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 3y agoWhen 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.