Ann Gibbons at Science reports on how “Researchers use ancient DNA and proteins to read the biology of books”:
Behind locked doors in one of the oldest libraries in Europe, two dozen scholars mill around a conference table where rare medieval manuscripts perch on lecterns, illuminated by natural light streaming in from floor-to-ceiling windows. Most scholars simply look at these precious books while librarians turn the pages for them. But evolutionary biologist Blair Hedges, wearing gray rubber gloves, approaches one book with a mini–cotton swab. He gently dabs the circumference of a hole in the original white leather binding of a rare 12th century copy of the Gospel of Luke. Then, he inserts a tiny gum brush—the kind teenagers use to clean their braces—into another hole to swab its edges. His goal? “To collect bookworm excrement for ancient DNA analysis,” says Hedges, who works at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
As Hedges magnifies the holes with a lens on his iPhone, book conservator Andrew Honey of the University of Oxford notices that the holes extend all the way back to the oak boards beneath the binding. Honey suggests that furniture beetles laid eggs in the oak before the bookmaker bound the wood in leather. The larvae lurked there for years before developing into adults that exited through the leather. That means it’s likely that “the holes were made by beetles 900 years ago … the oldest example of wormholes I’ve ever seen,” says Hedges, who uses DNA and the size of the holes to assess the type of beetle and so help identify where books were made; the DNA will also help him trace the evolution of the bookworms themselves. […]
At the symposium, Matthew Teasdale, a postdoc in Dan Bradley’s lab at Trinity College in Dublin, reported on the biology of another valuable text: the York Gospels, thought to have been written around 990 C.E. DNA from this book’s eraser shavings showed that, aside from some sheep, its pages were mostly calfskin—mainly from female calves, which was unexpected because cows were usually allowed to grow up to bear offspring. Historic records report that a cattle disease struck the area from 986–988 C.E., so perhaps many sick and stillborn calves were used for parchment, says zooarchaeologist Annelise Binois-Roman of the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
The York Gospels also offer a rare record of the people of the book: Almost 20% of the DNA Teasdale extracted from its eraser shavings came from humans or microbes shed by humans, he announced at the symposium. This is the only surviving Gospel book to contain the oaths taken by U.K. clergymen between the 14th and 16th centuries, and it’s still used in ceremonies today. Pages containing oaths were read, kissed, and handled the most, and these pages were particularly rich in microbial DNA from humans, Teasdale reported.
It’s a great read, with sentences like “The book was comprised of skins from an estimated 8.5 calves, 10.5 sheep, and half a goat.” And its mention of quires led Trevor Joyce, who sent me the link (thanks, Trevor!), to say “it prompted me to try guessing the etymology of quire (I drew a blank).” It’s a nice etymology; to quote Wiktionary:
From Middle English quayer, from Anglo-Norman quaier and Old French quaer, from Latin quaternus (“fourfold”), from quater (“four times”). Doublet of cahier.
We discussed quires themselves back in 2004. And the mention of “Annelise Binois-Roman of the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne” makes me grumpy: aren’t we allowed to just say “of the Sorbonne” any more?
“aren’t we allowed to just say “of the Sorbonne” any more?”
Regrettably, no. In addition to Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne), there’s also Paris 3 (Sorbonne Nouvelle), the former Paris 4 and Paris 6 (now Sorbonne Université), and Paris 13 (Sorbonne Paris Nord). Whatever their other virtues, the French are astonishingly bad at university branding.
I have seen a US comic trope (in The Simpsons episode “Gone Abie Gone” and the movie Rushmore) that the most academically ambitious US college applicants disdain the Ivy League in favour of “the Sorbonne”. That was probably true in the 18th century, but hardly lasted to 1968, and makes no sense after the subsequent changes
Bah, humbug. Let officialdom nomenclate as it pleases; when I think of “the Sorbonne” I think of this, and I’m sure that’s true of Simpsons and Rushmore as well.
When my second daughter was in Paris for the fall semester she was taking classes at “the Sorbonne” in the specific sense of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorbonne_University , i.e. the merged former IV & VI, not the I of “Pantheon-Sorbonne.” Because they thought she should not try anything more ambitious than freshman/sophomore level classes (she was a junior in U.S. terms, but not for French-medium-of-instruction purposes, they thought) her classes were not in the old-timey Left Bank location but in the outskirts-of-town Clignancourt Centre – you have to put in your dues for a while before you ascend in the hierarchy enough to get into classes that meet physically in the Sorbonne-in-the-architectural-sense.
where rare medieval manuscripts perch on lecterns
It’s pretty risky to let such rareties “perch”. They should be “safely ensconced on lecterns”.
I believe that is the first time in my life I have used the word “ensconced” – and I hope it will be the last. It has for me, nowadays, an odor of thesaurus-driven journalese.
In another recent study, researchers found that skins of pinnipeds were used for book covers in the Monastery of Clairvaux in France and several of its daughter monasteries in the Netherlands and England. All the skins are located by DNA analysis to seal populations in Scandinavia and the Norse lands in the west. They note:
They go on to describe the trading routes and market towns linking Nidaros to Clairvaux. The court of the archbishop must have become very creative in transforming the stream of tithes into profitable goods (as evidenced by the Lewis chess pieces), but I’ll still suggest a simpler route: The monastery at Tautra in the Trondheim fjord was probably part of this very line of descent from Clairvaux.
The stuff about bookworm DNA sounded familiar — it’s the same story I linked in a 2021 comment.
My eye was caught by the sentence “This is the only surviving Gospel book to contain the oaths taken by U.K. clergymen between the 14th and 16th centuries, and it’s still used in ceremonies today.” Mostly because “U.K. clergymen” seems grossly anachronistic/incoherent – there was no U.K. until the 18th century (and when there finally was a U.K. in political terms it was not entirely united in ecclesiastical terms) and it seems unlikely that any oaths taken 5-7 centuries ago in all parts of the now-U.K. were not also extant on the Continent at the same time.
More info would be useful on current “ceremonial” use of the book – it apparently lives in the library of York Minster rather than some university or museum, so it’s right at hand when an appropriate member of the clergy asks the librarian to check it out.
“U.K. clergymen” seems to be a misleading gloss by Gibbons; Teasdale et al.’s wording is “It is the only surviving English Gospel book to contain the oaths taken by the deans, archdeacons, canons and vicars choral, dated to the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, and is still used in ecclesiastical ceremonies today.”
I’m still not sure what intersection of properties is which is qualified by “only”. Maybe the final “is” should be deleted.
I guess in those long ago days of regional variability, it might have contained only the specific forms of oath used at York Minster, with no surviving Gospel book (although maybe some other sort of item?) containing similar but not necessarily identical oaths used for the holders of the same positions at other cathedrals in other English dioceses?
it’s the same story I linked in a 2021 comment.
Great heavens, so it is! Ah well, I obviously didn’t click through at the time…
‘only… by U.K. clergymen’ would be fine if no similar Scottish or Irish documents survive, although ‘oaths’ rather than ‘the oaths’ would be better in that case.
All it needs is a little boost — Paris 1:Pantheon-Sorbonne Premier Select — and it could be a middling but tremendously expensive soccer club for 11 year olds.
Very misleading; I would understand the version quoted by Mollymooly to refer to the clergy of York Minster, not all British/English clergy!
I was at Paris 6 when it was independent; it was Université Pierre et Marie Curie at the time, and I’m pretty sure Paris 4 was the Sorbonne.
…and the merger was first to “Sorbonne Universités” and only then to “Sorbonne Université”.
I don’t understand what you mean. The sentence is clear to me: this is the one-and-only book that contains these oaths, and it is still used today.
Presumably these oaths were no longer used after the early 16th century because they were in Latin?
Were the oaths always written in (on the blank paper at the end of?) a gospel? Or are there other surviving sets of oaths not written in gospels?
Elsewhere I read that twenty gospels survive from the pre-conquest era. Might some of them have oaths taken by deans and archdeacons, but not canons and vicars choral?
I agree it’s a very clumsy sentence which makes it impossible to determine what exactly makes it unique and what is just colorful detail.
The best description of the York manuscript I’ve found is here. There don’t seem to be any facsimiles of the oath pages online.
The oath pages seem not to have been part of the original gospel book: they were bound in later. See the “codicological description” on the second page of the linked PDF. Pages 6-7 give the incipits and explicits of the oaths.