CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND—New research and imaging work has discovered erasures in The Black Book of Carmarthen, the earliest surviving medieval manuscript written solely in Welsh. The book, which contains religious and secular poetry—including the earliest known poem about the adventures of Arthur, and two poems attributed to Merlin—dates to 1250. Myriah Williams and Paul Russell of the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic at the University of Cambridge used a combination of ultraviolet light and photo-editing software to examine the book’s 54 vellum pages. They found that additional verse, doodles, and marginalia, added to the manuscript as it changed hands, had been erased, perhaps in the sixteenth century by a man named Jaspar Gryffyth. “The margins of manuscripts often contain medieval and early modern reactions to the text, and these can cast light on what our ancestors thought about what they were reading. The Black Book was particularly heavily annotated before the end of the sixteenth century, and the recovery of erasure has much to tell us about what was already there and can change our understanding of it,” Williams said in a press release. For a look at an early Christian manuscript discovered in an Irish bog, see “The Faddan More Psalter.”
Technology Recovers Marginalia From Medieval Manuscript
News April 7, 2015
SHARE:
Recommended Articles
Artifacts September/October 2021
Late Medieval Ring
(© Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales)
(Crown Copyright: Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales)
Digs & Discoveries March/April 2018
He’s No Stone Face
(Courtesy Howard Williams)
Artifacts May/June 2024
Medieval Iron Gauntlet
(Courtesy Canton of Zurich)
-
Features March/April 2015
The Vikings in Ireland
A surprising discovery in Dublin challenges long-held ideas about when the Scandinavian raiders arrived on the Emerald Isle
-
Letter From the Marshall Islands March/April 2015
Defuzing the Past
Unexploded ordnance from WWII is a risk for the people of the Marshall Islands—and a challenge for archaeologists
-
Artifacts March/April 2015
Antler Chess Pieces
(Courtesy Andy Chapman/MOLA Northampton) -
Digs & Discoveries March/April 2015
Seismic Shift
(Courtesy Sichuan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology)