Alan Yuhas writes for the NY Times (archived) about a very cool find:
Torn, folded and stitched, rare tales of Merlin shapeshifting into King Arthur’s court and Sir Gawain gaining power from the sun were bound into a book of property records from the 1500s. They went unnoticed for centuries, stacked among the records of an English manor and then among the millions of volumes of a university library. At least until an archivist took another look, setting off a yearslong project to identify and then reassemble the medieval manuscript, which someone in Tudor England had taken apart and used to help hold together a ledger.
The manuscript turned out to be a priceless find: extremely rare stories of Arthurian romance, copied by a scribe between 1275 and 1315, and part of the “Suite Vulgate du Merlin,” an Old French sequel to the start of the Arthur legend. Cambridge University researchers announced their findings this week and published a digitized version of the manuscript online.
There are fewer than 40 copies of the Suite Vulgate sequel known to exist, and no two are exactly the same. “Each manuscript copy of a medieval text, handwritten by a scribe, is going to be changed little by little,” said Irène Fabry-Tehranchi, the French specialist at the university library. “As the copies come along, each scribe imposes his own taste.” […]
At the time of its creation, the manuscript was “a luxury item,” she added, most likely imported to England by aristocrats familiar with Old French as the Arthurian romances grew in popularity. But as the stories were translated into English, the value of such manuscripts fell.
Unless one had a bunch of deeds or the like lying around and in need of a little binding. That may explain how someone at Huntingfield Manor in Suffolk in the 16th century settled on the old parchment as a bit of raw material to strengthen a ledger.
The manor’s collection came to Cambridge in the 1970s, but it was only in 2019 that an archivist realized that the hidden manuscript deserved a closer look. The painstaking process wound up taking years, given that the fragile manuscript had been recycled inside a book that was itself centuries old. “We really needed to go into the nooks and crannies of this object,” Dr. Fabry-Tehranchi said.
The details of how they did it (involving multispectral imaging, a CT scanner, mirrors, magnets, prisms and other tools) are fascinating, and I like the conclusion:
It was not just the innovative use of imaging, Dr. Weaver said. It was what came next, and what it might mean for other researchers. “It was the digital unfolding that really astonished me,” she said. “I can’t wait to see that new technique applied on other tricky in-situ manuscripts.”
Dr. Fabry-Tehranchi expressed a similar hope. “There are still things to be discovered,” she said.
Thanks, Eric!
“Fabry-Tehranchi” is an excellent name. It just is.
It’s even better than “Merleau-Ponty.” The French do these things so well.
It is indeed; I had meant to comment on it, so thanks for doing it in my stead!
The webpage is a marvel itself.
I was wondering how they got the date down to a 40-year range and was sort of expecting some sort of fancy chemistry-or-radiation testing of the physical manuscript, but the press release the NYT story was largely based on says “The way the manuscript has been carefully executed, with decorated initials in red and blue, gave further clues to its origins and helped indicate that it was produced between the end of the 13th and the beginning of the 14th century.” Obviously, there was evolution over time in that sort of stylistic thing, but was it really so complete (in terms of any given “new style” completely replacing its predecessor) that you can be confident about a range as short as 40 years?
Separately, I’m slightly puzzled by the press release’s “The text is written in Old French, the language of the court and aristocracy in medieval England following the Norman Conquest.” On the one hand, it may be perfectly fair to think of what’s usually called “Anglo-Norman” as a dialect of Old French and not think a given sentence needs to further specify the dialect. On the other hand, now I can’t tell whether the MS is written in Anglo-Norman or in the standard/prestige Paris dialect of Old French or in some mixture (as when a text originally written in one had been imperfectly copied by a scribe who knew the other better and thus inadvertently introduced some dialectisms), and each of these possibilities seems plausible.
Excellent question about what they mean by “Old French”. According to this BBC story, “Stylistic evidence in the text indicates the fragment was written by an unknown scribe in a northern French dialect understood by English aristocrats.” (Those are the BBC writer’s words, not a direct quote from Fabry-Tehranchi, but I presume it’s based on what she said.)
I guess the press release writer thought “Anglo-Norman” was too technical for the public. Maybe that’s true.
A pedant would observe that between the end of the 13th and the beginning of the 14th century pins down its date of production to a point and not a range of 40 years. .
Einhorn’s Old French actually does include “Anglo-Norman” in its chapter on Old French dialects.
I don’t think it’s at all unfair to characterize Anglo-Norman as a dialect of Old French. My concern is more whether (esp. by the time in question), some other Paris-based variety of Old French was enough of a literary standard that saying a literary work is written in “Old French” means written in that standard variety unless explicitly otherwise specified. And for all I know this MS may have been written in that variety! It’s plausible that it was close enough to Anglo-Norman that the English gentry (those who were actually literate …) could read it without particular difficulty. Maybe this MS was even produced by a Paris-based scribe and then subsequently journeyed across the Channel.
A pedant would observe that between the end of the 13th and the beginning of the 14th century pins down its date of production to a point and not a range of 40 years.
Yes, and I observed that too, though I’m not a pedant, exactly.
JWB: “for all I know”? Did you miss my comment half an hour before yours? According to the BBC story, it was *not* written in a Paris-based dialect but in a “northern” dialect.
@ktschwarz: I think of Paris as being decidedly in the “North” of France and even to some extent in the North-of-the-North if you carve out the whole langue d’oc South as irrelevant. But maybe I didn’t pick up a nuance or implicature that regardless of the map French conceptual geography is so Paris-centric than “northern” necessarily means meaningfully-north-of-Paris. Although one assumes that “Norman” dialects have to be “Northern” and I think you could historically find speakers of them if you traveled due west or even a bit WSW from Paris.
The manuscript was found in 2019, and a scholarly book, The Bristol Merlin, was published in 2021. I’m not sure what is new now. Were parts of it inaccessible before, and not utilized in 2021?
Y, the Bristol Merlin is a *different* manuscript also discovered in 2019, in “the bindings of a four-volume edition of the works of Jean Gerson in the early sixteenth century” now held in the Bristol Central Library, it says here. This Smithsonian story about the Cambridge discovery also mentions the different one at Bristol.
Not quite on that scale, but at a job I once had I had to unbind a mid–19th century French book. One of the pieces of scrap paper inside the spine was an earlier 19th century laundry list. It was moderately exciting. They may have kept it.
@JWB, OK, it’s true that Paris is in the North, in the Oïl zone, so I see how you read it that way. I just can’t believe Fabry-Tehranchi would specify something that came through as “northern French dialect understood by English aristocrats” unless she meant to distinguish Anglo-Norman from Parisian (which is a distinction that anybody studying writings of the period would be very interested in). We’ll have to wait for a more scholarly report.
@ktschwarz: and for my part I can now easily see on further reflection why in context “a northern French dialect” might well have been intended to contrast with, and thus rule out, a Paris-based dialect. I guess Paris was kind of “central” within the langue d’oil zone, neither as northern as Picardy or as southern as Orleans or Berry. And of course Anglo-Norman (if viewed as distinct from Normandy-Norman) was such a “northern French” dialect as not to have actually been spoken in “northern France,” which is yet a further source of potential confusion.
From The Bristol Merlin, pp. 43–44:
[six specific features discussed in detail]
There is also a detailed discussion of the paleographic dating of the manuscript, to between 1250 and 1275.
So this newly-discussed MS may or may not vary in dialectical features from the Bristol MS, but “Francien” = Paris. But at least it’s not (shudder …) Lotharingian! Deo gratias!
ktschwarz: quite right. They were both found/announced in 2019, and that was what confused me.
The manuscript of Beowulf is said in many references to be pinned down to 975–1025 based on the handwriting, and then the Bristol Merlin is given a range of only 25 years, so I guess a range of 40 years for this manuscript is not too unusual?
(And yes, I also noticed “between the end of the 13th and the beginning of the 14th”. Should’ve been “between the late 13th and the early 14th.”)
It just depends on what particular paleographic fashions happened to change when. The pa;eographic analysisi in The Bristol Merlin makes freequent references to this list of diagnostics, as an example.
You or I could probably date most printed English-language books of the past 100 years to within a decade, by inspection.
Should’ve been “between the late 13th and the early 14th.”
That still doesn’t work for me. I prefer “during the late 13th or early 14th century”, or, of course, “between 1275 and 1315”, with an “about” or some such as needed.
So, uh. How did du Merlin happen?
How did du Merlin happen?
The Blackbird ? A suite of vulgar blackbirds.
Am I the only one who thinks “Bristol Merlin” sounds like an airplane part?
Sounds like a complete aeroplane to me. Probably rather like a Sopwith Camel, only spiffier.
I’d say a surgical knot, or a fishing fly.
I used to know a professor of surgery who liked to ask young surgeons what a “Surgeon’s Knot” actually is. Nobody ever knew. (He was the life and soul of parties.)
How did du Merlin happen?
Early reader of Marion Zimmer Bradley?
Was his name Kevin? Internet says yes.