Students discover hidden 15th-century texts on medieval manuscripts

Rochester Institute of Technology students discovered the lost text on 15th-century manuscript sheets using an imaging system developed by freshmen. Using ultraviolet fluorescence imaging, the students revealed that a manuscript leaf kept in the RIT’s Cary Graphic Arts Collection was actually a palimpsest, a manuscript on parchment with multiple layers of writing.

At the time the manuscript was written, the production of the parchment was expensive, so the leaves were regularly scraped or erased and reused. Although the erased text is invisible to the naked eye, the chemical signature of the initial writing can sometimes be detected using other areas of the light spectrum.

“Using our system, we borrowed several scrolls from the Cary Collection here at RIT and when we put one under the UV light, it showed this amazing dark French cursive underneath,” said Zoë LaLena, a science student at the second-year imaging from Fairport, NY, who worked on the project. “It was great because this document has been in the Cary Collection for about a decade and no one has noticed. And since it also comes from the Ege Collection, which has another 30 known pages of this book, it’s really fascinating that the other 29 the pages whose locations we know have the potential to be also program listings “.

The imaging system was originally built by 19 students enrolled at the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science’s Innovative Freshman Experience, a one-year, project-based course that has the imaging science, film science, and photographic science programs combine their talents to solve a problem.

When RIT switched to distance education in March due to the coronavirus outbreak, the students were unable to finish construction, but thanks to a donation from Jeffrey Harris ’75 (photographic science and instrumentation) and Joyce Pratt, three students received funding to continue working on the project over the summer. Those three students: LaLena; Lisa Enochs, a second-year double major in film science and image science from Mississauga, Ontario; and Malcolm Zale, a second-year film science student from Milford, Massachusetts, finished assembling the system in the fall, when classes resumed and began analyzing the Cary Collection documents.

Steven Galbraith, curator of the Cary Graphic Arts Collection, said he was thrilled to have discovered that the manuscript leaf was a palimpsest because similar leaves have been extensively studied by scholars across the country, but never tested with UV light or fully photographed.

Collector, educator, and historian Otto Ege made collections of damaged or incomplete medieval manuscript sheets and sold or distributed them to libraries and special collections throughout North America, including the Cary Collection. Galbraith said he is excited because it means that many other cultural and academic institutions with Ege Collection lets now have schedules in their collection to study.

“The students have provided incredibly important information about at least two of our manuscript sheets here in the collection and in a sense they have discovered two texts that we didn’t know were in the collection,” said Galbraith. “Now we need to understand what those texts are and this is the power of spectral imaging in cultural institutions. To fully understand our collections, we need to know the depth of our collections, and the science of images helps reveal all of this to us.”

Students are interested in seeing if more manuscript sheets from Ege collections across the country are palimpsests. They picked up another folio from the Ege Collection at the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library that turned out to be a schedule and is reaching out to other curators across the country. When they begin to mend the lost text, paleographers can examine the information they contain.

Students have been selected to share their findings at the 2021 International Congress on Medieval Studies and also plan to present the project at next year’s Imagine RIT: Creativity and Innovation Festival.