Gone Medieval - Findling Lost Medieval Manuscripts

Episode Date: March 26, 2022

A gap in knowledge - both of stories and artefacts - provides a frustrating block when looking into the past. But, a new report, based on the use of statistics, is hoping to shine a light on some of these hidden mysteries. This week Matt is joined by Dr Katarzyna Anna Kapitan from the University of Oxford who talks Matt through her fascinating research, from finding out that medieval romance manuscripts were recycled into Bishop's mitres to the masses of Icelandic manuscripts discovered preserved across Europe.For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Gone Medieval newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download, go to Android or Apple store. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Matt Lewis. A recent report has looked into the survival of medieval manuscripts and chivalric stories using a new and perhaps surprising technique. We all know some variation of the story of King Arthur that began to take solid form in the 12th century and texts like Beowulf, are the stuff of legend, both the story and the manuscript itself. Manuscripts in English fared particularly badly compared to some other languages

according to the study's findings. And I'm delighted to be joined today by Dr. Katazina, Anna Capitan, one of those involved in the new study, to talk a little bit about their methods and what they found. So thank you very much for joining us this morning. Thank you, Matt, for the invitation, and thanks for having me. Can you tell us first a little bit about why medieval manuscripts have only survived in such small numbers. What are the factors that mean there aren't that many of them that survive to today? Yes, this is a very important question for our research, because our research focuses on this

idea that the sample we have today is not complete and what factors contributed to preservation as well as to loss. There are two main reasons why manuscripts can go missing. One is library fires, as the recent library fire in Cape Town, and the other one is recycling of manuscripts. So the library fires is the more obvious factor that we are all aware of. For instance, in Old North Studies, we are very well aware of the great fire of Copenhagen at the beginning of the 18th century

where the great amount of medieval Icelandic and other Nordic manuscripts went missing. While when we think about recycling, various, very creative ways of reusing manuscripts. One of the more common things is using fragments of medieval parchment books to strengthen the binding of medieval and early modern books. While among those more creative ways, we can mention a parchment leaf used to strengthen the mitre of a bishop. I saw that in the report and my jaw just dropped when you think, you know, they're taking a medieval manuscript that we would have loved to have been able to see today and just using it to stiffen a bishop's mitre, you know, just to make a hat look a little bit better,

it seems like an absolutely crazy way to lose a manuscript. Yeah, it's a good point, but actually the parchment was used within mitre. So it didn't look, you know, you didn't have a text visible from the outside. It was just to stiffen it. But what is amazing is that this text is actually currently romance, right? So the story of love in a metre of a bishop, that's a really fascinating case. I wonder if he knew that he had that on his head when he's talking about moral issues on a Sunday, giving his sermons and things, that he's wearing some chivalric romance that probably tells naughty stories on his head.

That's a very good point, yes. And the study used what's called the unseen species model as a way of investigating manuscript survival. Can you tell us a little bit, please, about what the unseen species model. species model was and then why it was a good fit for looking at manuscript survivals? Right. So the method applied in our study is a statistic method developed by Professor Chow, who's one of the authors on our paper. And this method lends itself useful to estimating species richness of an assemblage. What means that we basically have just a sample of species, of items, of classes, taxonomies, which have common and rare species. And in Chaua One formula, we use

those rare species, so they're observed only once or twice, to estimate how many species we didn't observe. When you're in a field, you know, counting bugs and insects and things, you can see so many of them, but from that you can extrapolate how many there are that maybe you can't see. Is that about right? So, yes, but basically the work that is behind this way of thinking, we could say that the foundation of this work was actually lied down by Alan Turing in his code-breaking work during the World War II, because they were also trying to estimate how many words they haven't seen in their dataset.

So it's kind of unseen species of words. So it's not only method used in ecology. It can be actually used across various disciplines, and everything that can be grouped into classes or taxonomies and has items representing those classes, you can apply the statistical formulas. Okay, so it's being used in ecology, but the system itself doesn't really care what it's looking for. It doesn't mind whether it's looking for bugs or animals or missing manuscripts or missing words. Yes, you are absolutely right.

There is nothing specific about this method to ecology or manuscript studies. it has really broad applications and similar models or similar ways of approaching missing items actually have been used previously also in scholarship. Fascinating. I might not extend it to looking for all my missing socks, but it seems to have sort of endless applications perhaps. How did you go about bringing together the team that worked on this project? How did the project come about? Thanks for asking. Yeah, everything started actually with Mike and the Follhead, so two main author. of our paper with their experiments on their own native language, so Dutch. And they presented their work, one of the lockdown conferences, so one of those conferences where we could travel across the world to see things that

we wouldn't usually see. So I saw Mike presenting at a conference, and immediately I thought that, wow, I really would like to know how all North Icelandic literary tradition would fit and how it would look comparing to other languages, right? So I contacted Mike afterwards, asking whether he would be interested in comparative study or expanding it to apply the same method to my corpus. And yeah, it turned out that we're thinking the same. Mike and Follhead were already pulling together a team of scholars from different fields to do this kind of comparative study. So basically it was kind of natural common interest that brought us all together. And in my particular case, the driving force was

my own interest in lost saga literature, because I wrote my PhD on the lost medieval saga. So I was always intrigued to think, like, how many other sagas are lost? What is it that we don't know about? So those were the questions that were driving force for me. Yes, I guess we sometimes feel like we're lucky to have so many manuscripts surviving, but when you think there must have been so many more out there, you're left wondering, what have we lost? What amazing stories have we never going to hear? Absolutely, yes. This is the depressing finding of our study, right? Yeah. And so how important were things like surviving catalogs of manuscripts and helping to

build this model? Because presumably, even if we don't have the manuscript itself, if it appears in a catalogue, we can start to think about how many did exist that we know. don't exist now, does that help to build this unseen species model approach? So in our case, we weren't using catalogs, medieval catalogs at all. The findings that we present are exclusively based on this statistical model. So just building on the data sets, we extracted from existing digital catalogs of manuscripts, so only existing manuscripts. We plotted that into the Chaua 1 formula and three or four, I think, other formulas used to estimate the same kind of things to see how that fits. But obviously, in philology or in book history, library

catalogs are very important and there has been terrific work done on trying to estimate loss based on library catalogs and references actually to other texts. Because what I would like to first emphasize is that our study is not. focused exclusively on manuscripts. We've got two types of laws. The immaterial, let's call it, loss of works, so stories, and the small material loss of manuscripts, so the artifacts that were preserving those stories. And then when you look at the library catalog of, let's say, medieval monastery, you'll have

a list of books with more or less detailed contents. Like not always, it's really easy to know which works were actually preserved in given book. Very often is just the beginning of a text because uniform titles weren't used at that period, their later invention. So, of course, based on this sort of analysis of library catalogs, we can say, we've got that much surviving or that much went missing. while for works we can also use references to works in other works. So if a text mentions another story, for instance, in my research I was working with one saga,

which is mentioned in another saga from the 13th century. So we know that in the 13th century, or we hope we assume that in the 13th century, this saga already existed, circulated in one form or another. So this is again hint towards, yeah, survival or loss of medieval literature. Yeah, absolutely. So there's a difference, I guess, between the survival of the physical manuscript that is the copy of a story is potentially different to the numbers of survivors of the stories themselves. So we may have one version of a story that refers to another story that we don't have a copy of. So we may have lost a story but not a manuscript. We may have lost a manuscript but not a story if it's preserved elsewhere.

perhaps? You're absolutely right, yes. Fascinating. So what did the project actually discover in terms of survival rates? So in our project, we looked at two specific genres or two specific actually types of stories rather than genres, romances and heroic narratives. And we look at six vernacular languages. So just a huge disclaimer, this story is not about all medieval literature and all medieval manuscripts, just a small subset that we selected. And for the total data set consisting of six languages, we came up with this estimate

that only 9% of manuscripts that used to preserve the chivalric and heroic narratives survive to our times. While when it comes to works, it actually, our estimates suggest around 68% of survival rate, across the six languages. And what were those six languages? Sorry.

So our study focused on Icelandic, Irish, English, Dutch, German and French. The Iads of March, the 15th of March, it's perhaps the most famous, or shall we say, infamous day in the ancient history world because it was on that day in 44 BC that Julius Caesar, dictator of Rome, was assassinated in a Senate meeting. But what do we know about the event? of the Ides of March 44 BC. Did Shakespeare get anything right? And what happened next? Well, every Sunday, this March on the ancients from history hit,

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every Sunday for our special Ides of March mini-series. So there's an interesting mix of, so Icelandic sagas is your area of expertise, but spreading across the continent into what we might think of as the more sort of French romantic chivalric stories. This, you're right, yes, absolutely. And I think the report suggested that perhaps only about 5% of manuscripts in the English language survived, which is lower than that sort of overall amount of 9%. But other languages survived a lot better. so Irish I think was around 19%

and Icelandic was at 17%. Why do you think things like the Icelandic saga manuscripts were more likely to survive than some of the others? Yeah, this is very good question and it's not a question that we actually managed to answer

within this story. This is something that we really would like to look more deep in the future, how or what kind of factors influence, loss or survival of medieval texts or medieval artifacts. But if I were about to speculate about possible answers to these questions,

like why Iceland has high survival rates and why it has such a high evenness profiles, as you might remember from the paper, we're also talking about evenness profiles. There are two things that come to my mind. And the first one is the late introduction of the printing press, together with the printing monopoly of the church.

And the second one, is the dominance of multi-text manuscripts in our corpus. So when it comes to the printing press, it arrived to Iceland in the late 16th century. And for good 200 years, the only printing press was owned by the Bishopric, which meant that only texts that were valuable enough from the perspective of Bishopric could be printed. And the entertaining literature has those heroic narratives and a romantic narrative, and romances, they remained copied by hand through the entire early modern period, which meant then that Icelandic audiences were used to manuscript medium

as an active medium for text circulation. And perhaps also because of that, more manuscripts survived because they were part of the same still-leaving tradition. Yeah. And does this sort of hint then at survival in perhaps Ireland and Iceland being to do with being slightly more disconnected from the continent and sort of cultural movements there, things like the printing press arriving later and being restricted to church press, which I guess, you know, the bishop doesn't want some of these romance stories on his coffee table.

Does it speak to places like Ireland and Iceland being that slightly bit more removed from continental Europe? That's a good question. I really do not feel comfortable making any statement about Irish literature, because all I know about Irish. literature is thanks to Padre, one of the authors on our paper, so I think he would be in a much better position to answer this question. But when we think about Iceland, this idea of Iceland being disconnected is only partially true, right? Because the question is what do we think by being disconnected? Are we talking about cultural disconnection or just about physical disconnection?

you know, it is an island. What I'm thinking more is actually the usage of Icelandic as a language which is limited to Iceland, right? You do not have many Icelandic speakers outside of the island. So in that sense, yes, language is disconnected, but we couldn't say that Iceland is culturally disconnected from the mainland Scandinavia because the Icelandic history shows very close ties to Norway, to Denmark, and yeah, being just part of this cultural milieu of Scandinavia in general. That's interesting because I think in the study as well, it mentioned that, well, there's

kind of a heat map of the survival of manuscripts across Europe and the French language texts didn't survive in particularly higher numbers than English, but they were sort of spread across Europe much more widely. And I guess that might reflect the use of the French language much more widely across Central Europe and even into England in the medieval period, which you wouldn't have with Iceland, I suppose. As you say Icelandic was an Icelandic language used in Iceland and not very far from there. So there was no call for Icelandic texts to be taken to other places, whereas French as a more widely used language, those manuscripts could have been dispersed a lot more, which I guess opens them up to being lost more easily.

Is that fair? This is a good question and interesting hypothesis to entertain, but I will surprise you probably by telling you that Icelandic preservation of Icelandic manuscripts is not limited to Iceland, actually. So those are very complicated, multi-layered arguments that we are trying to build here, right? Is disconnected? Is it historical? Is it cultural?

Is it linguistic? but when it comes to actually dispersal of Icelandic manuscripts and we intentionally didn't include it in our study because, well, it's complicated and we had three or four pages to write our paper on. But the story of Icelandic literature is very interesting because in the early modern period, Danes and Swedes, so Danish and Swedish Crown,

after the dispersal of Kalmar Union, they were interested in using Icelandic literature or Old Norse literature as historical sources. And this is something that I was looking at very closely in my previous postdoc. So at this quest for Icelandic manuscripts and Icelandic stories in Denmark, where they were simply treated as historical sources. And majority of Icelandic manuscripts actually ended up in Denmark at some point, in a collection of one famous collector called Artney Magnusson, who was living at the end of the 16th century.

And well until the 20th century, this collection was in Copenhagen. So basically, if you made a dispersal map of Icelandic manuscripts, majority of those manuscripts would end up visualized in Denmark. But then, what happened when Iceland regained independence, first in 1918, then in 1944, Icelanders got interested in transferring their cultural heritage to Iceland. They didn't want their manuscripts and their texts being stalled in Copenhagen. There was a huge case between the two countries where the manuscripts are supposed to be.

And to make a very long story short, basically half of this collection was transferred to Iceland. And the second half is still in Copenhagen. But Icelandic manuscript can be also found in Germany, in Sweden, Norway, in the UK, fair amount, but mostly post-medieval codices. So, yes, the historical processes also influenced what the manuscripts are today. That's interesting. And do you think Icelandic manuscripts and saga stories then survived better because they were treated at some point as historical sources, as almost like chronicles, so found a slightly different way of being preserved?

Do you think that affected their survival rates or not? That's very good question. And I think it's again a complicated one. When we think about the antiquarian interests in Icelandic literature in Denmark in the 16th century, I would incline to say that it played an important role in preservation of cultural heritage of Iceland, but that's kind of funny that they got preserved because of the Danish efforts, you would say. And again, to not simplify it, it doesn't mean that there was no interest in Iceland to preserve their own cultural heritage because we know that the reason why Bishop Rignol Wurzweinson

in the 17th century, he sent some beautiful medieval codices to Denmark as a gift to the king, was explicitly to make old North or old Icelandic literature accessible to wider European audiences. So he was hoping that by sending those codices to Denmark, those texts will be edited, translated and printed and made widely available. So there is definitely interest in Iceland. There are intellectuals, humanists who are thinking about Icelandic history, but also the Danish-Swedish interest in Old Norse literature contributed to this preservation. And was there anything that came out of this study that you found particularly

either interesting or surprising? Yeah, so I would say those even especially, profiles. I don't know whether you've noticed in our study, but when we were trying to point at factors that contributed to the survival of those different literatures, we found that Icelandic and Irish had higher evenness profiles. And this is again the concept that we are borrowing from ecology. And in our case, this means that on average, the number of manuscript copies per text is more evenly distributed, or number of manuscript copy per work actually, is more evenly distributed.

And this pattern of transmission might be one of the factors that actually contributed to Icelandic and Irish high survival rates, because we can see then that in other traditions, we have works that dominated the tradition. We have many manuscripts of the same. work and that many works preserved in very few copies. And that's not the case with Icelandic and Irish. And again, it's fascinating because this makes this literature small resistance to loss. So when you lose a random manuscript out of the sample, you are less likely to lose the work because this work will be also preserved in other manuscripts. So it's very interesting.

Yeah, I'm thinking some of the losses of English manuscripts, particularly in thinking of the fires and things like that, where only copies of things were destroyed, so you lose the manuscript and you lose the story altogether. And that doesn't seem to have been the case with Icelandic manuscripts. They were more evenly spread, as you say. Do you think this model has other applications in relation to history and culture? Did it make you wonder where else you could use this kind of approach? As we emphasised in our paper, there is nothing. specific to ecology, nor to manuscript studies about this statistical method we applied. So it can be applied everywhere where we have species that we can count. And some of those species are frequent and other species are less frequent, right? So basically the applications are endless.

For a future research perspective, and again from the perspective of Old Norse Icelandic studies, I would be really interested at staying in the domain of works and manuscripts but looking at different genres, different types of literature. Because there are many pre-assumptions we have based on this sample, oh, was it really this

monopoly of the church when it comes to printing of literature did really contribute preservation versus loss of other types of literatures? I think it would be really interesting to make a comparison across different genres and then see whether the internal differences within the entire corpus of Icelandic literature.

I can imagine it's the sort of thing that you do and while you're doing it, your mind is racing on to the next 10, 20, 30 things that you could use this approach for to answer questions that you thought there might be no way to answer previously. Absolutely. This is exactly what happens. You finish one paper and then you've got 10 different ideas. Oh, fantastic. Well, I look forward to reading the next 10 papers on this subject then. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Katasina and a Capitan. It's been absolutely fantastic to talk to you. Where can people find you on Twitter if they'd like to follow you and find out a little bit more information? You can find me on Twitter as Katarina Ann,

so without Las A, and that's just to save space of Twitter handle. And obviously my University of Oxford email address, I would be happy to answer any questions and hear any comments. Fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you very much, Matt, for having me. It was pleasure talking to you. You can join Dr Kat Jarman on Tuesday for another brand new episode. Don't forget to please subscribe to Gone Medieval wherever you get your podcasts and tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you have a moment, please drop us a review or rate us wherever you listen to your podcasts, including on Spotify.

now. It really does help new listeners to find their way to us. If you're enjoying this podcast and looking for a little bit more medieval goodness in your life, then subscribe to our Medieval Monday's newsletter. Just follow the links in the show notes below. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hits.