Once I was a clever boy learning the arts of Oxford... is a quotation from the verses written by Bishop Richard Fleming (c.1385-1431) for his tomb in Lincoln Cathedral. Fleming, the founder of Lincoln College in Oxford, is the subject of my research for a D. Phil., and, like me, a son of the West Riding. I have remarked in the past that I have a deeply meaningful on-going relationship with a dead fifteenth century bishop... it was Fleming who, in effect, enabled me to come to Oxford and to learn its arts, and for that I am immensely grateful.


Monday 21 February 2022

Lost manuscripts


A recent study has sought to use the models used to calculate the distribution of living species to try to estimate the rate of survival and of loss of medieval literary texts. 

The study was first published in Science and can be read at  ‘Lost’ medieval literature uncovered by techniques used to track wildlifeThe sting in the tail in the last comment therein is worth pondering: the project confirms more or less what bibliographic studies had concluded, and suggests national or regional variations but does it add significantly to our understanding?

The New Scientist report on the project can be read at  Medieval literature: We have lost 90 per cent of the original copies of classics

There is a rather longer one from the University of Oxford website can be read at Everyone has heard of King Arthur, but 90% of medieval manuscripts of chivalric and heroic tales have been lost

I have a book I picked up secondhand on lost books of the medieval centuries, into which - like so many books I own - I have but dipped. This is concerned not so much with lost copies - and many important literary and chronicle texts survive in unique copies or single numbers - but texts we know existed but of which no copies are extant. The twentieth century did see not a few such works surface to add to our knowledge but the losses are very considerable. Our knowledge that there are such losses is a tantalising thing - we know there was more, yet we are seemingly unable to recover those manuscripts and what they could tell us. 

The Medievslists.net site gave five examples of  significant lost texts in a 2016 article which can be seen at Lost Works of the Middle Ages

Research which has recovered texts, even if only in part, is highlighted by reports last year from the University of Edinburgh in Scholar helps solve mystery of rare lost text and the University of Rochester in the US, again from Medievalists.net.,in 2020 at Lost medieval text discovered on 15th century manuscript


Events such as the damage caused by the fire in Ashburnham House to the Cottonian Collection in 1731 can be assessed from catalogues, descriptions anf in some cases transcriptions, but some things, many things, are, alas, irretrievably lost.


2 comments:

John R Ramsden said...

One of the biggest losses of ancient documents, IMHO, is that of the Disciplina Etrusca, "The Etruscan Disciplines", which was the pagan Romans' bible.

Apparently an early pope in around 400 AD ordered all surviving copies to be destroyed, because he believed they might encourage sorcery and suchlike. (By then nobody would have been able to understand a word of them, because the Etruscan language had become extinct along with all its few remaining speakers by about 100 AD.)

Most of the text itself was probably a lot of ritualistic, repetitive nonsense. But its value would have been in helping reconstruct more of the Etruscan language and perhaps relating it to other languages and thus helping confirm where the Etruscans originated.

Regards

John Ramsden

https://highranges.com

John R Ramsden said...

Another great loss, if it ever existed, was the remaining and now lost part of the Satyricon by Petronius.

Most of the surviving part is the Cena Trimalchionis, "Trimalchio's Dinner", a saucy (in every sense!) and racy account of a dinner hosted by a comically vulgar nouveau riche character called Trimalchio.

Some scholars believe the surviving portion was only a small part of a much longer work which originally detailed the journeys and adventures of the three young rascals who feature in the Cena.

But because the work was apparently written (as some believe) to parody the excesses of Nero's court, with Nero as the ridicuous Trimalchio, and Petronius was later forced to commit suicide by Nero, I suspect it may be that the author wrote little more than the surviving part, with references to other parts to tantalise Nero anticipating he would wish to locate them, rather as Private Eye ends its parodies with "continued on page 94", which of course doesn't exist!

Regards

John R Ramsden

https://highranges.com