Gone Medieval - History in Flames: Destroyed Manuscripts

Episode Date: September 26, 2024

Bonfires of paperwork have accompanied human upheaval for centuries, eradicating, making space for rewriting. Imagine standing in the centre of Paris as revolutionaries sweep away the old ways along with the ashes of centuries of records and memories.Matt Lewis is joined by Professor Robert Bartlett to consider how much of what we might have known about the past has been consumed by the fires of revolution and war, and how close we were to losing every word of Beowulf.Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis and edited by Ella Blaxill. The producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off your first 3 months using code ‘MEDIEVAL’ https://historyhit.com/subscriptionYou can take part in our listener survey here: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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History in Flames. It's an invocative title for a book. Bonfires of paperwork have accompanied human upheaval for centuries, eradicating, making space for rewriting, or to encourage forgetting. Some was wanton, some a careless side effect of conflict. Imagine standing in the centre of Paris as revolutionaries sweep away the old ways along with the ashes of centuries of records and memories. Would you have placed a hand into the fire

to save something for us to read more than two centuries later? How would you pick which singed collection to save? How much of what we might have known about the past has been consumed by the fires of revolution and war? How much has been lost? and what is it that was destroyed? These are some of the questions tackled by my guest's new book, History and Flames, the destruction and survival of medieval manuscripts.

And that guest is a favourite historian of mine. Having embarrassed him at Chalk Valley by gushing relentlessly when I got to interview him on stage, I'll try and play it cool now. Robert Bartlett is Professor Emeritus at the University of St Andrews, whose books and television series have brought medieval history to hungry new audience. If you haven't seen them yet, find them out. But wait until after you've listened to this episode. Welcome to God Medieval, Robert. Thank you. History and Flames, I guess my first question would be, why did you want to write this book about the things that we've lost? Well, if you're a medieval

historian, you spend years, or in my case, decades, working with the evidence, which is manuscript material. Everything you get from the Middle Ages, written evidence is written by hand. That gives it a particular feel. I always remember the first time I sat down with a genuine medieval manuscript when I was in my early 20s. The smell is very distinctive. But because the Mysterial is all manuscript, there's much less of it than in modern times when you have a print culture. And it's vulnerable. It can be destroyed in all sorts of ways, flood and fire and so on. So you think about how precarious this is. And so I looked at some cases when a very large amount of that medieval manuscript material was destroyed in one catastrophic event. I've got five case studies.

So it's to discuss what there was, what we've lost, how do we know what we've lost, because it's no longer there, and what can be done to fill that gap, if anything. So those are all questions that came straight out of working on a manuscript culture. Yeah, I guess we fall into that. Is it Donald Rumsfeld thing of there's known knowns and there's no known unknowns and there's unknown unknowns. Absolutely, absolutely. A very simple example that I gave is the plays of Eeschylus, a very famous Athenian dramatist. And I think there's something like either five or six that actually survived to this day. That represents about less than 10%

of the plays that we know he wrote. And we know he wrote them from references in other authors, occasionally quotations from him in other authors. And just now and again, since they've had the expiration of the papyri in the Egyptian desert, sometimes you turn up a little scrap that has a little bit of eosceles on it, but it's not in any surviving play. If anyone was going to sit down and write about eskulus, they'd have to be really aware

that you've only got 10% of its place. So when we think about what's come down to us from particularly the medieval period, you'd discuss in the book a little bit about how the materials that are used can influence the chances of survival. So things are written maybe on clay tablets, then papyrus scrolls, then parchment,

books. Can you talk us through a little bit of the advantages and disadvantages of each of those mediums? Yes. The origins of the Western tradition of writing are in Mesopotamia. And there, the first writing is on clay tablets. And it's a kind of writing called kineoform in which a read was used to imprint the marks on a wet clay tablet, which was then baked or sun-dried. And the advantage of that from the point of view of survival is that it's very much less vulnerable to fire than other forms of written material because it's already baked. One of the problems about getting access to all that material is that there's very few people who can read that stuff. And of course, there's thousands of these things have been found over the years of excavation. But the

amount of it that has been interpreted and even more translated means that it's a world where there's plenty to find out, but it'll take a long time. And then you move through time to papyrus, which is made from reeds from the Nile. So it's a quite different kind of material. altogether, much more vulnerable in the sense that it can be ripped and it can be burned quite easily. That's the kind of material you have, which was kind of standard in the classical world, the world of ancient Greece and Rome. All the great works, the one thinks of Homer and Virgil and so on, would all be in the form of papyrus scrolls, and the scroll would be a role. And very often these works, you find them in modern editions, there'll be book one, book two, etc. The book that we have

nowadays in a printed edition corresponds to a scroll. So how many scrolls there were for these things. And excitingly, it's taken us a bit away from the Middle Ages. When Herculaneum, the twin sister of Pompeii, was excavated. One of the villas they found there was completely full of hundreds and hundreds of these papyrus rolls. And the problem was they'd been charred by the heat and the fire of Vesuvius. So no one wanted to unroll them. If you unrolled them, they probably crumble. but just recently, very sophisticated technology has been used to try to read what's in those scrolls without actually unrolling them. This is a very complicated task. I don't claim to understand the technology myself. And so for the very first time, people can actually begin to say,

well, that's what this scroll is. This is part of the story of the line writing about. How do you find out about these things that are lost or almost lost? And then the big change from my point of view is in the late Roman period when two things happen, the material for writing changes from papyrus to parchment. It's rather nice because when a new technology comes along, people are often thinking, how does it relate to the old technology? Is it the same kind of thing or not? And I came across a reference in a monastic chronicle

when he's first using parchment, he calls it animal papyrus, which I thought was rather nice because you're interpreting it from what you know. And of course, it's not papyrus, it's animals. But that's the thing that strikes him. And the other thing happens at exactly the same time is that people move from the scroll to the codex. That is the book that we're familiar with, with pages that you can turn and a spine that it's sewn to and so on.

And that has all sorts of advantages, including the protection of the material and the fact that you can go to any page you want very quickly. So it's quite different material. And that age of the parchment codex is the middle ages. And then for the next thousand years or so, that's the standard book. There are exceptions. You can clearly make rolls out of parchment. It's quite easily done. And the English Royal Administration, for some reason, that was the main form in which

they kept their records. So it's not that you can't make roles, but that was the main form in books and libraries, down to the invention of printing in the 15th century when a whole new world opens up. Yeah. And so I guess parchment still maintains that vulnerability to fire and water, but in the form of a codex, it has a degree of protection in that it's closed and those leaves, within it, those folios inside, can be kind of protected by the covers and the folios around them. Yeah, you see it most clearly, I think, in the case of those fabulous illuminated manuscripts, because they've been protected by the book being closed and stored somewhere. It's not open to the elements all the time.

And sometimes some of those illustrations, they look like they were done yesterday. They're beautiful, absolutely beautiful. So that's definitely one of the things. But you're right, parchment is vulnerable to fire. it is much tougher than either papyrus or paper. So the actual parchment material is something that is pretty tough. It stands up to handling. It can indeed be burned.

And you need quite a big fire to burn a parchment book. You can't do it easily on a bonfire. That sounds dangerously like you've tried, Robert. I don't want to get into trouble. This is a thought experiment. Let me say this is a thought experiment. That's why the case studies that I've taken all involve modern explosive technology, the high technology of destruction. Because one of the things that the

book is about is the way that just as scholars studied this material and archivists gathered it, there was also at the same time fantastic development in the technology of destruction and warfare. And that's where these two things coincide are the case studies that I know. One of the other things I found really interesting that you detail is a little bit about how we have an idea of how many manuscripts there might ever have been. So how fast enough could someone compile one of those manuscript codexes, you know, a monk sitting in cloisters. So what do we know about how quickly they could physically write one of these manuscript codexes? Well, there is evidence.

One I cite is of someone who actually, he recorded the fact himself in the manuscript he's copying out. He's copying out a very big history of France in French. It was chronicles of the French kings all put together. It's very large. First of all, he records that he's quite old, so I had a lot of sympathy with him. And secondly, that he's working away at this stuff, and he tells you how long it took to do it. So he tells you exactly how long it took to do it. The manuscripts so survive so we know how long it is.

So you know how long copying out that amount of material took. You have to make some assumptions, of course, about did he work every day, etc., etc. So that would be one. And another one I rather like is there's a famous author called Christine de Pison. She was an Italian origin, but working in France. And she is often described, and I think with some justification, is the first professional female writer. She is a full-time writer.

And rather unusually, she's not only a writer in the sense of composing written works, but she actually copies them out with a pen herself. We know that. And there's a manuscript surviving copied out by her, which she's copied out. A gathering is a number of folios bound together. It would be like six or eight of these folios.

And she's very proudly at the end of one, she said, I copied out this whole gathering in one day. She's very proud of that. And that's her handwriting, of course, because we know that she was writing it. So you've got little indications of the speed. And then, of course, the other thing that you have to build in, if you're thinking about how much material there was, not simply the speed of one scribe, but how many scribes there are, and how common is the ability to write? Because the ability to read and the ability to write are separate things. And they were regarded as separate skills. And I think many more people

have the ability to read and the ability to write. It was seen very much as a manual exercise. You know, for the monks, they have a phrase, to work is to pray. Labarrari, esterare, so actual physical work is deemed to be some kind of almost religious activity. And writing out books would definitely qualify as that kind of work that is also prayer. So you've got the number of people and then you've got little changes, things, for example, like what kind of script is there? Do you have joined up script, cursive, or do you have the script where all the letters are separate? And it's pretty clear that writing in cursive is faster to do than writing where all the letters are separate. And then a final thing is that towards the end of the Middle Ages, paper makes its appearance in

Europe. It had been around in China for hundreds and hundreds of years. It had then come to the Islamic world. And from the Islamic world, it finally came to the Western Christian world. And you have the beginning of production of paper mills in Spain and France and so on at the end of the Middle Ages. There's even one in England right at the very end of the Middle Ages, the 1490s, I think. And so you've got paper and tests have been done that writing on paper is perhaps something like 30% faster than writing on parchment. The surface is different and how much is the ink going to penetrate the surface? These kind of things will make a difference to the writing experience. And so you have all these variables if you're going to say how much was produced. And then, of course, once you have a

set of assumptions like that, you have how much it's produced and then you have to say, and how much is lost. And scholars have tried that. And it's something you can do with a kind of degree of certainty if the sample you're talking about is quite small or limited and circumscribed. There's a very big project that's been going on for years, which is the survey of English medieval library catalogs. And that's been published in many volumes. It's an ongoing project. And so that's putting together all the things that we know were in English medieval libraries.

And it's a very useful and wonderful project. And then, of course, you have to say, you know, how much of that stuff actually survives. And Neil Carr, who was one of the great paleographers and scholars of manuscripts, he thought something like, it was a guest. He thought something like 85% of the stuff that's in those catalogs,

no longer exists. So 85% has gone leaving you with 15%. So every time you're saying you're talking about the culture of medieval England, the learned culture or the written culture, you've got to build in 85% loss rate in for those things. It's similar to what you're talking about before, that anybody writing about this stuff has to be aware that you've got a very limited amount of survival of plays, but also when we talk about medieval history of everything, we may have lost 85% of everything that was ever written down about the medieval period. That is just a phenomenal thing to ponder. And the book does deal with some instances in which this destruction took place, and it deals really with man-made

destruction of these medieval records rather than sort of accidents. One of the ones that you mention that keeps us in the medieval world a little bit longer is during the peasants' revolt, so there is a significant burning of manorial records and things like that during the peasantry vault. What does the destruction of records then mean to the peasants and what does it mean for us now? I think it meant to them, and I cite some other examples as well, which were back this up, they thought that writing was being used by their masters and by lawyers to hold them in a subservient position. I think that's what they thought. And that means, of course, that they might generalise because in some cases, of course, they were dead right because these documents actually recorded the obligations of the serfs and so on and so forth.

And when the rising broke out in 1381, there's an attack in Cambridge in which the mayor joined in. So, I mean, it's not just the peasants rising. There's hostility to the lords and the written records that the lords can employ and the lawyers who back them up. That's why there's such a targeting of court records of all kinds. And that happens actually in the villages as well, where the rebels would actually go and get the court records and burn them because they're local manor courts. That's very much how it's seen.

There is actually a court role from one of the manners after the rising. And it says this is the first court held after the burning of the court records. It doesn't say after the rising or the rebellion or the peasants revolt or whatever. It says after the burning of the court records. So that was what they saw. And I have another example, which is quite a lot later, but the similar kind of view of people's motivation in Naples at the beginning of the 18th century, when the local people stormed the archives where all the criminal records were kept and burned them. That was clearly an assault on this state that they saw as keeping them under their thumb. There's a rather well-known and rather interesting story about the 1381 rising.

the Peasants Revolt in Cambridge, in which after many of these books and records have been burned, the chronicler says, and an old woman came and grabbed hold handsfuls of the ashes of what had been left by these burnt records and threw them in the air, shouting away with the learning of the clerks, away with it. And so there's a lot of really encapsulated hostility to literacy and the literate in there. The clerks, clerks means the people who can read and write, but also from her point of view, the people who are members of the oppressive classes or the aides and abettors of the oppressive classes. Yeah, I was quite interested on that example that you mentioned too, that obviously that is recorded in a chronicle in Latin, but the Latin word that's used for learning, because that way with

the learning of the clerks makes it sound a little bit like I've had enough of experts. We don't want any of your intellectual stuff around here. But that word could also be translated as expertise or the skill of the clerk. So what she's potentially really saying is away with this skill of the clerks of setting everything down in writing that keeps us in chains effectively. Exactly that, exactly that. What she said, obviously she spoke in English, but what she said is recorded in Latin by the chronicler and Pyritya. It means skill, certain kind of skill. And that's what she is saying, the skill of the clerks. And the skill of the clerks is writing and literacy and keeping records. She's not doing anything practical by

throwing the ashes in the air, right? She's simply rejoicing about this destruction. Yeah. And you also refer to an incident during the French Revolutionary Wars where a collection of Pierre Clarembeau's books are burned kind of in the middle of Paris by the revolutionaries. We would associate now today with a real work of evil, I guess, the burning of books and knowledge and all of that kind of things. How significant was the loss of someone like Pierre Clarenbeau's collection? Do we know what was amongst those books? Do we have a sense of what we'd lost there

or just that we've lost a lot of stuff? Some of the books survive. In fact, the book starts with an example from one of the surviving manuscripts of Clarenbo. So Clarenbo's manuscripts were collected in the first case many years before the revolution by Claremba, obviously, and his job was to gather material relating to the aristocracy and their ancestors.

So it's a family tree of the nobles of France. When you come to the French Revolution, the revolutionaries are not going to be interested in that material at all, right? They want to get rid of the aristocracy. So someone who's just collected all that stuff, that's going to be to them the old regime, right, as they called it. That's going to be destroyed. They made exception.

We have the documents of how they decided all this. They said, if there's anything in the... material that may be of general use to society or that contains a certain kind of legal rights that are still relevant, then don't destroy those. But the vast bulk of that material was destroyed. So because you have some surviving manuscripts, you get an idea of what Clarenbeau collected. Sometimes he copied out earlier manuscripts. Sometimes he actually incorporated them. So you'll find them bound in. The example I use is from a document from 1390 from the King's Royal Huntsman. So you find things like that which have slipped through the net of destruction, as it were, but there's no

question that once you have, I mean, the French revolutionaries at that time, they wanted a fresh start. I mean, they're not only chopped off the King's head. They had a new calendar. You know, this is the first day of the year one. And they kept that on for some while before, you know, Napoleon came along and things went back to how they had been. So you've got a kind of desire to get rid of the past that's no longer interested at all in manuscripts of the aristocracy because you want to get rid of the aristocracy. That doesn't happen all that often,

but it does happen. Real revolutionary change. And you think of the countries where it has happened, such as France is a good example, obviously, because the French Revolution was so dramatic. And then the countries where there has never been quite that clean slate, England is a very good example because the English medieval records are amongst the best in Europe because of that continuity. And you can understand how ideology fits into this.

If you've got an ideology like we're making a fresh start now, the records of the past are not important. If you're looking at, as many people did, if you're looking at English history as a continuing story of the nation and so on, then the national past is very important. and that's why you have in the 19th century, particularly, but subsequently as well, government funding for the examination and publication of medieval sources, and it's regarded as a national task in some ways. And you'd find that in other countries as well. I suppose to some extent that particularly kind of 19th century drive to reproduce

and reprint and catalogue these things better helps with survival rates because if there's multiple copies, then the source itself becomes slightly less vulnerable? It's a very two-sided thing. I agree with you entirely. There's these great state-funded projects to copy out and print medieval chronicles and documents, the whole written record of the Middle Ages. It's a major thing. And of course, it continues to this day. And once that's done, then that material, the texts are now secure in a way that they hadn't been when there was just one copy of things. You know, once you have one copy of things, very vulnerable. The example I give, I have a chapter on Beowulf manuscript because everyone's heard of Bayolf.

You know, if you said to someone, tell me the name of one old English poem, you know, I bet money they would say Bayer Wolf, right? And it's now been made into films and video games and it's been translated dozens of times and in different languages. But that was survived in one manuscript only. And it survived a fire in 1751 when it very nearly got burned up. And if that had happened, we'd know virtually nothing about Bayerwolf. So it's only when it's printed.

as a printed edition comes in. So all that, I think that's absolutely right. So the state and its interest and stress on national history is very important in helping the survival of this material. On the other hand, the creation of central repositories, public record offices, state archives, municipal libraries, the concentration of media of material in those places also is one of the things that made that material vulnerable. And I think in every case that the five case studies that I have, the municipal library in Strasbourg was a depository in which many things from monasteries and churches had been concentrated, when that was shelled by the German forces in 1870.

If those manuscripts had all been kept in their different churches, then they wouldn't have all been destroyed because they were concentrated at one place. The next example is the destruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland in the first first. week of the Irish Civil War in 1922 when the forces outside shelled it and the garrison inside had a lot of inflammable material and grenades and petroleum and so on. And that all went up. The public record office went up in 1922. It had only been created in 1867. But between 1867 and 1922, there had been a major campaign to centralize the records in the public record of so on all sorts of things have gone in there, not just medieval stuff, but census records and registers of birth, marriages and deaths and so on.

So when that went up, you suddenly had lost something that hadn't actually been concentrated there for all that long. It's only the last 50 years that they'd actually got this massive concentration and material, and that made it vulnerable. So you've got the state, on the one hand, helping historical research, on the other, creating the vulnerabilities. And just lastly, of course, it is the state, in most cases, that is waging the wars that lead to these massive conflagations

and the loss of tens of thousands of manuscripts and books. I hadn't known too much about the Irish Public Records Office, but we were in Ireland fairly recently filming about some Irish castles, and we were talking to a contributor about, you know, we were at Trim Castle. Why can't we find the ordinary stories of people of Trim while all of the Anglo-Norman invasion and stuff is going on? And that's because in 1922,

all of those records were utterly destroyed and lost, And so oddly, as part of the Irish Revolution, it destroyed the records of ordinary Irish people. We still know about the great lords that were over there. But it's that sense that we've lost a connection to the ordinary people of the past that was probably absolutely not what was on the mind of the people shelling the public record office. But nevertheless, is a side effect that so many of those ordinary lives are pretty much lost to us now. That's absolutely right. I mean, it's a great irony, I think, that the Irish struggle for national self-determination

had as a byproduct the destruction of the bulk of Irish national records. It's a very ironic situation. I point out in the book, there's been an amazing amount of work. I have some heroes in this book, and the heroes are the people who either kept a record of these materials, be they illuminated manuscripts or government records, before the catastrophe. So there are copies made and so on. And the other heroes are the people who have tried to reconstruct what has been lost up to a point. and you sometimes you're scraping the barrel a bit.

And the example I give because I happen to know the documents, most of the royal records went up in smoke in 1922. But there were also some records, medieval records, of what you might call private non-royal documents. And there were some monasteries in England and Wales that owned land in Ireland. And so their records were not necessarily in the royal depositories like Dublin Colour.

and so on. So they didn't go into the public record of it. And there's a bunch of them in particular that I've studied of a monastery called Clantone in Wales. And that had lands in Ireland. And they had a survey done of their estates in, I think it's 1408. And those records were not destroyed in 1922 because they were still in the possession of the monastery of Clantone. And in the end, they went into private hands and from there to the present-day national archives. So you can go to queue, which is where the National Archives are, as you know, and sit there and you've got a complete description of exactly what you're talking about, the lives of ordinary people in mainly county meath, what their rent was, what animals they had, what duties they had, how much land they had,

the families and so on. So there's tiny little ways round. It's not as if the loss is total. I mean, the loss is enormous, but you've still got ways of kind of finding what you can. It was the anniversary in 2022 of that destruction, and it's a famous incident in Irish history. there's been a long-term project to see what can be done. And they now have a website you can go to in which they recreated an image of the Public Record Office of Ireland as it was in 1922. And you can go into that and you can look in the area

where particular records were kept. So you can click on the area where the Exchequer records were or the Chancery Records or what it might be. And that will lead you to a list and a description of all the things that could be used now to supplement the stuff that was lost. Sometimes it's duplicates that were sent to England. Sometimes it's transcripts that were made by scholars before 1922.

It's an amazing achievement. Because, of course, I'm writing about terrible loss, so it's good to have an occasional kind of upbeat story there. A little bit of hope, a little pinprick of light in the darkness of all of the loss. Slightly unfair and mean question, maybe. Of your five case studies, if you could undo one of them and have all of those records back, which one would you undo? Well, I think the answer would probably have to be Dublin because that was the biggest loss of continuous documentation, of which in many cases there's no other copy. So there's no substitute. There are sometimes duplicates that were sent to England, but that's only for a minority of cases. And in two of the cases, I actually concentrate on a particularly remarkable.

document, an individual document that was lost. In the case of this Schelling and Strasbourg in 1870, I look at a particular illuminated manuscript, the Garden of Delights, the Hottes, Dilichiaram, which is a fabulous late 12th century illuminated manuscript, very, very beautiful, and we know about it in various ways. That would be great to have again, but that's one thing. And similarly, with the bombing of the State Archive in Hanover, by the RAF during the war, Second World War, the loss of a thing called the Ebstorff map, which is a Mapa Mundi, that is a map of the world. People are often familiar with the Hereford Mapermundi.

The Ebstorf Mappermundi, which was destroyed in the bombing, was vast. It was 12 feet by 12 feet. The Hereford Mappermundi is made from one animal skin, and the Ebstorf one is made from 30. So you can see the difference in scale. It was obviously the largest Mappermundi of which we have knowledge in the Middle Ages. And that, of course, would be a wonderful thing to have. The EBSDorff map particularly is a loss in many ways, but particularly because as the technology for analyzing and exploring documents and manuscripts of the past gets more and more sophisticated and it's getting more and more sophisticated all the time. I give the example of a late 12th century beautiful manuscript from Spain.

It's a collection of charters, royal charters, but it also has pictures of all the kings and queens of Spain of Aragon. And the art historians are quite clear that this document was compiled over quite a long period of time. And they see that there's kind of changes in the style of the images of the rulers that are painted in there. So it suggests that some are earlier and summer later. And much more recently, in very recent times, they now have a technology called X-ray fluorescence, which enables them to analyze the chemical makeup of pigment to a fantastically sophisticated degree. and they've gone through and they've worked out how much, you know, lead is in the white and the chemical components of the pigment. And the result, it kind of confirmed the art historians.

What they've been saying, good luck to the art historians for that. There's actually different chemical composition of those images that they thought of us earlier from those images that they thought of us later. So you can actually go and have this incredibly sophisticated profile of the chemical makeup of the pigment of an individual image. in a medieval manuscript. If you had the Garden of Delights from Strasbourg, or if you had the Ebstorff map from Hanover, then you could do that now. But since you haven't, you can't. That's what's been lost. So I suppose I would say, yes, I'd love to have the Epstorff map. I'd love to have the Garden of Delights. And the losses in the other cases as well are very, very important. But I think in terms of straightforward historical information,

probably what was lost in Dublin in 1920, outstrips the other ones. If we consider then that there is a limited amount of medieval manuscripts that ever existed, and there's some detail in the book about what that kind of number might have looked like in terms of the millions of manuscripts that may have existed, limited by who could write them and how fast they could write them. and then we think that perhaps 85% might have been lost completely. How do you think that should affect the way that we approach dealing with medieval history? Because surely we have to be conscious that what we have is just a very small survival,

that there's so much more that we don't know or we'd have to be careful about reconstruct. Does it need to affect the way that we deal with medieval history and medieval records? Well, it should make us humble, shouldn't it? That's the first thing I think to say. I had a tutor at Cambridge many years ago where I was an undergraduate. And he was a famous contrarian and a difficult man, but a great teacher. And he at one point said to me when I was 19 or something, he said, The past doesn't exist.

There are just traces that we interpret as the past. And he wasn't being a radical postmodernist or anything. He was in fact a Thatcherite, which is rather different. But he did make a point that I've thought about ever since. And it's true. The past is not there. If you read a history textbook, you might get the impression, oh, yeah, we know everything was going on. And this is the story completely without any problems of interpretation or, you know, how do you know?

It's not a very good textbook that does that. But I mean, there are such. Or if you watch a documentary, sometimes a documentary is on television, rush over the problems of how we know what we know, I think. So the starting point is indeed, we have things in the world today that we know about. it might be a piece of writing, it might be a building, and of course it might be things like archaeological remains of all kinds, pollen and so on. And we choose to interpret them as signs and markers of what has gone before. That's a very interpretative approach to this material. And we really have to be aware that that is not going to be a total picture. It can't be a total

picture. The actual calculations of, you know, how many manuscripts were produced, I report those rather than endorse them. You know, I mean, that's a very speculative game. And some people would say it's nonsense, the figures that people have come up with. I think in general, you know, we can make a few general points that over the course of the medieval period, the thousand years, the later part, there's more produced, not simply that more survives, but more produced. And there's many ways you can measure that. And there's kind of bottlenecks and fast movements. I mean, I think it's very clear that the Carolingian period, around about 800 to 900, that the amount of copying of earlier manuscripts suddenly boomed. And I think in many cases, if you haven't got the work copied in that

period, it's probably not going to survive. It's a very narrow bottleneck. The example I choose to discuss is the poet Lucretius, and Lucretius was active in the first century BC. His poem is one of the longest statements of a purely materialist philosophy we've got. He thinks there is nothing in the universe except atoms and the void. He thinks the idea of God's making the world is ludicrous. He thinks that after you die, you die. I mean, it's a very radical materialist philosophy. The only reason we know that about that poem is that two monks copied it out in the time of Charlemagne. One of them certainly at Charlemagne's court. I mean, that's really representable itself, right? So that's something that has come through from the ancient world,

but there's no copy of it that we know of. The earlier surviving record is 800 years after it was composed. And it seems that those two manuscripts were not copied for most of the Middle Ages. No one in the Middle Ages really cites or knows Lucretius. It's just gone. And then at the very end of the Middle Ages, there's an Italian Renaissance figure, Poggio, who loves manuscripts. He's a manuscript Hunter, and he finds a copy, and then it can be copied out, and then it can go into print, and then it can be read by the learned people of Europe and has been ever since. And so it just made it through, and we would have known nothing about that fantastic, materialist epic, unless it had been for the monks at Charlemagne's court.

What the monks were thinking when they copied this stuff out, we don't know. Yeah, I think the same is true with things like Beowulf, isn't it? you don't expect those kind of pagan or, I don't say anti-Christian, but sort of A-Christian things. You don't expect monks to be reproducing those. You think they'd be the things they set aside and say that doesn't fit our worldview, therefore we won't copy it out and preserve it. And yet they don't seem to make that distinction. It's valuable because by the time they're copying it out, it's 8 to 900 years old.

Yeah. Well, Beowulf's a very interesting example because if you go through it, I think there's evidence that in the poem, I'm not talking about in the world from which the poem came, in the poem there of belief in God. I think there's no doubt about that. I think it's probably right to say you could imagine that this is a poem by someone who believes in God, but not in Christianity. I don't think there's very clear traces of Christianity in it. So it's not as if there's anything really against the Christian religion in it. As distinct from Lucretius, The Cretius is full of stuff that is entirely contradictory to the Christian religion, right?

I'm entirely contradictory. And you've got to imagine a world in which the monastic body, the monks in Anglo-Saxon, England, would have fathers and cousins and brothers and sisters and other family members, who themselves might have been of warrior aristocracy status. And they, of course, would quite like this story of, you know, fighting monsters and dragons and warfare and the rest of it, right? So it's not as if the monks were sealed off entirely because they all came from families. Many of them came from noble families and the nobles were brought up in a world of military aristocracy. So there's something there in the ethos that is not

entirely alien, I think, although I agree. It's very different from, say, the religious poems that come down from the same period. Beowulf is one. I mean, it's such a narrow escape. I mean, if Beowulf had burned up in that fire in 1751. All we would have was a little catalogue entry for when the manuscripts were cataloged in that collection 50 years earlier. And the summary says nothing whatsoever about Grendel or Grendel's mother. So we would have never heard of Grendel and Grendel's mother if that fire had been a little bit hotter or burned a little bit further or whatever. Because, you know, the stuff that was lost in that fire was enormous. I think it would need a much bigger book to look at loss in general. And there have been some great books on this kind of subject,

Mowndon, on the libraries, the burning of the libraries or whatever. And I'm just taking case studies because they all have something in common. They're all products of the European warfare of the 19th and 20th century in which a mass of medieval material disappeared in a day or sometimes in an afternoon. And so I have to talk, of course, about the 19th and 20th and 20th century politics that led up to that situation, and then also the history of archives and the history of archivists. So it's a rather specific angle on this. I found it an absolutely fascinating book.

It is very sobering when you look at the sheer amount of stuff that's being lost. It makes you wonder what we might have known if it hadn't been for those destructive forces that weren't bent on destroying those books. That wasn't the design of what they were doing. It's almost that loss is a side effect of politics and, man-made warfare. And I think, as you say, quite humbling for us to think about how precarious some of the stuff that we do have in front of us, how lucky we are to have it, how incredible

is that even that 10 or 15% have survived. So I really enjoyed the book. It was in some ways a difficult week because you say it's dark. It's about destruction and loss. But there are those moments of the heroes who've saved things, the hope for what's been salvaged and the new technology that will hopefully reveal more to us that we can't even dream of yet. Yeah. I got quite keen on the so-called heroes. You know, I mean, there's some remarkable characters, really. I mean, in the case of Chartre, the local archivist of the Departement,

the area in which Chartre is located, was a pioneer of aerial photography. And he not only photographed some of the manuscripts, which you can good to do on a table, but he also photographed Chartre Cathedral from the air in about 1912. You know, I mean, this is like really early days for aerial views of things. And that, of course, is an entirely different. world, you open up to the study of the medieval past from the air. That's been a very big thing. And then, particularly in the case of the Garden of Delights, because we actually have 19th century prints of some of the pages of the Garden of Deliance. And that was done by a man whose name you can never forget, Count Bastard. He was really called Count Bastard. And he was a member of a

noble but poor family in the southwest of France. And he was a military man. He was a younger son. So he had to go in the army. And he fought for Napoleon. And then I, after the restoration of the Bourbon Kings, he fought for the Bourbon Kings. And all the time, he was nursing this interest and love in medieval illuminated manuscripts. And he taught himself lithography, which is, I understand, a fairly complicated printing process

in order to produce illustrations of these things that could then be reproduced. He sent some copies to the great exhibition of 1851 in London, and he was hailed as one of the people who had made it possible for people to see beautiful medieval illuminated manuscripts without having to go to the individual monastery or the library or wherever they were kept,

that opens up a whole world, doesn't it? Because if you study art history now, it's unlikely that you're going to go and look at every individual medieval manuscript. You're going to have reproductions and so on. And he was the man who went ahead with that. And we could, of course, still be losing stuff. I mean, I was astonished to hear

that the Ministry of Justice has just come up with a suggestion they have digitized all wills and testaments since 1858, which is when the state took over the responsibility of dealing with wills and testaments from the church. They digitized them all. And of course, the originals are all on paper. And in the early days, they're handwritten, and then later on, they're typewritten.

And now they're just suggesting that since this has all been digitized, they could destroy all the paper copies. Now, that brings a chill to the heart of any historian or archivist. Is that digitisation really so good that it's going to last forever? What happens if you want to look at the back of the thing? This sends a chill through your spine. But it's someone thinking, why do we need all this old stuff? The French Revolutionaries would probably be quite happy with this idea.

Yeah, but then I also think, you know, the book is about the accidental destruction of this stuff. The deliberate, willful destruction of it is something else that feels even dark. Maybe we should leave it on the high note of having the heroes who have salvaged some of this stuff for us. Yeah, I love the fact that the heroes, they do tend to be men, not always, but they tend to be men. but they're often middle-aged men with glasses. I think I really love this. They're not enough heroes like that. I'm sitting here as a middle-aged man

with my glasses on today. I'm feeling very grateful for that. Thank you, Robert. It's been an absolute joy to talk to you. Thank you very, very much for joining us, and it's been fascinating to explore the unlikely survivals and the sad destruction of so much medieval material.

Thank you very much, Robert. It's been a great pleasure. Thank you. Robert's book, History in Flames, The Destruction and Survival of Medieval Manuscripts is out now. And I commend his TV series inside the medieval mind, the Normans and the Plantagenets, if you haven't caught them yet. If you're interested in hearing more about manuscript making,

there's a fantastic episode in our back catalogue with Mary Wellesley on her book, Hidden Hands, all about how manuscripts were made. You can also find out more about the chance survival of Beowulf and what we might have lost with Janina Ramirez. Go and have a rummage in our loft and see what you can find. There are new installments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, come back next time to join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts

and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts, ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at history hit.com forward slash subscribe. And as a special gift, you can get 50% off your first three months when you use the code medieval at checkout. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hit.