The study seeking to estimate the number of lost literary texts from medieval writers which has brought a scientific model for species distribution to traditional bibliographic studies, and which I wrote about in Lost manuscripts,
has continued to attract interest on the Internet.
HistoryHit has a summary at Lost Literature: Why Most English Texts Didn’t Survive the Middle Ages and there is a much longer and more detailed report on the scientific basis of the study from arstechnica.com at Study finds 90 percent of medieval chivalric and heroic manuscripts have been lost
As one of those articles points out, literacy among lay people was mostly confined to the rich. But in those days the rich were usually far more interested in their hounds and hawks than in their few manuscripts and books. In the early 1500s, for example, the Duke of Norfolk declared "I thank God I never read a book. It was merry in England before all this new learning came among us!" (quoted from memory - Or am I remembering a line from "A Man for all Seasons" by Robert Bolt?! )
ReplyDeletePerhaps their neglect of books, besides the doubtless widespread view that reading was for clerks, was due to a desire not to risk needlessly straining their eyes. After all, even the best quality beeswax candles are not as bright as modern artificial lights, and spectacles were crude and cumbersome and poorly customised for their owner's vision, and good eyesight or the best that could be preserved was an asset for both hunting and battle.
But although some masterpieces have probably been lost, we can console ourselves that maybe on the whole the loss of manuscripts is analogous to biology in another way: The survival of the fittest
John R Ramsden
https://highranges.com
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ReplyDeleteP.S. The articles discuss the loss of past manuscripts. But there's a converse aspect to which it is perhaps also worth giving a moment's thought: The inevitable loss of more recent and present day worthy literature in times to come!
ReplyDeletePresumably the loss won't be irretrievable, due to poor preservation of few copies, but quite the opposite: An effective loss among the vast and ever increasing torrent of literature being published!
Even today, large libraries contain literally tens of millions of books, of fiction for example, and as this trend continues it won't be long before, on simple grounds alone of time and available readers, there are many books that nobody will ever read again!