So hello, everybody, and welcome to this webinar, Meet the Fragments. Thank you very much for being here.
My name is Helen. I'm the Education Officer at the Bodleian Libraries. The Meet the Manuscripts online event series was
inspired by the project to digitise manuscripts from German-speaking lands funded by the Polonsky Foundation.
And we will be looking at two of those manuscripts today.
The events have proved very popular, so we are delighted to be continuing the series in the autumn.
Just to let you know a few practical things before we start.
We are recording the event, but as this is a Zoom webinar, your video and audio are turned off and you won't appear in the video.
We will share a link to the film a week or so after the event.
Today's event features two of our wonderful Bodleian colleagues in conversation over some fascinating manuscripts.
And we'd like you to join the discussion. So if you would like to ask a question, please type it in the Q&A window throughout the event.
Please do check now that you can find the Q&A. You could also vote for questions you are interested in by clicking on the thumbs up.
And I will put your questions live to our experts during the session.
In your booking email, we've shared links to the manuscripts where available so you can take a look for yourselves.
This is the first event in the autumn Meet the Manuscript series. The next is on Monday, the 8th of November.
Do you sign up to the Bodleian newsletter and check the Bodleian website for details of all our upcoming events.
We really value your feedback, so please do fill out the short questionnaire after the webinar.
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This helps us to continue to offer and improve free events like this for everyone.
So once again, welcome. The plan for today is to focus on the fragments in manuscripts which are often ignored.
Our speakers are Matthew Holford, the Tolkien curator of Mediaeval Manuscripts, and Andrew Honey.
Book Conservator, Research and Teaching. Matthew and Andrew are both in the Weston Library on Broad Street in Oxford, but in different rooms,
and they will be examining the manuscripts together to consider the physical function of fragments and what they contribute to book history.
As I said, we'll pause during the session for questions. So please add these to the Q&A box throughout.
If we don't have time to answer all your questions today, we'll collate the most popular ones and do our best to answer them in our follow up email.
So I'll hand over now to Matthew and Andrew. Thank you very much, Helen.
Welcome, everybody. It's great to have you. It's great to be carrying on with the Meet the Manuscript sessions after our digitisation project is finished.
Although this session we are looking at some rather different material to the items we covered in earlier sessions.
We were looking in earlier sessions at some of the library's treasures, complete codexes.
And today we're going to focus on little, well, often rather dirty and stained bits of manuscripts that were used to bind other codexes.
So why are we doing this? It's because we need to to fully understand mediaeval book culture.
We need to pay attention to fragments as well as to complete codexes. No one really knows how many mediaeval fragments of codexes survive,
but it's probably at least as many as the number of complete codexes, and probably rather more. So
it's a very important part of the evidence for mediaeval culture and book history that we need to evaluate.
It's also, in many cases, the only contact that people have with mediaeval manuscripts is in the form of leaves or fragments.
So it's important to understand how we go about studying them and interpreting them,
and in particular the sort of double life that they have as evidence of one
codex that has been dismembered and then reused in a different context.
We're going to start off by looking at this fabulous and perhaps also slightly frightening volume, which is one of the Bodleian Library's Guardbooks.
So that's a collection of fragments removed from bindings of printed books or
manuscripts in the Library from the second half of the 19th century onwards.
Now, it sort of pains me to say that before that period, the Library didn't have a policy of retaining these fragments.
So if a book went to the Bodleian bindery before about 1850, any fragments that were in it were unlikely to be retained.
They weren't considered of interest.
Fortunately, that policy did change from the second half of the 19th century and the fragments were gathered in volumes like this.
So we're going to turn to one of these fragments and Andrew is going to help us think about
what we're looking at and how to how to understand the evidence of
stains and other features to understand how the fragment's been reused and what that can tell us about its history.
Thank you, Matthew. Well, if I can jump in now with one of the first things to just observe is, as we're looking at these fragments,
they're all arranged, as we might expect a book to be arranged.
So we've got lines of text that run across the page and which you can read. However,
I'm intrigued and we're looking at, the first group we're going to look at are these four leaves here,
folios four to seven, which we've got these sort of strange brown stains on.
But we've got four leaves from a manuscript that have been preserved in this case.
But here, so this is folios five and six. It's a lovely example.
You see these sort of unusual brown stains around the edges and right at the bottom near Matthew's finger there,
there's another stain with a couple of holes in it which is telling me I mean,
as a book conservator and someone who's used to handling bindings, how this was used, its second use.
So how this was sort of reused and recycled within a binding.
And once you start to think about those brown stains and so on, with my kind of Book Conservator hat on,
I'm thinking, well, actually that's the wrong way round.
It's not in a way that you could read, but actually was once in a different position within a book.
So to try and explain this, I have a mini model here.
So this is more or less what we see. And if we open it up, you can see these brown stains which stop characteristically here.
And then we've got a white area. And anything where you've got these sort of discontinuous stains makes you think something's happened.
So actually, if we, there's also a fold towards the top.
If I fold that down and you'll see on the other side of it, there's a, there's a bit of broun stain that matches up.
And this is telling me that actually what we have here was once a paste down,
so a piece of parchment that was stuck to the inner face of a binding and was used to
strengthen and also for the mechanical properties of parchment within the binding.
Now, it's lucky in this case that we've got a shelf mark written on it and we know that it was removed from
a book that was printed in 1565, in Venice, but that was bound in Oxford at around 1600. So,
the interest in fragments is not just what may be written on them,
but actually when when this became a material that was sort of recycled and available for reuse,
and we might think of this as a waste material, but in many ways it wasn't.
It was always material. But the binders who were using it were very conscious of the qualities of parchment.
So in this case, that
we might think of it just as a piece of waste material stuck inside a board, but it was actually helping the binding to function, to allow
the ability of the parchment as it sort of, the tensions, as it dries to create sort of tension within the binding,
that as the board opens, that the whole book begins to move.
So from it, from a kind of bit of binding history, this jumps out at me as,
from my point of view, mounted the wrong way round, but also telling us something about the afterlives of these things.
And then finally,
just one little bit of Bodleian history, that mark that I showed you at the bottom right hand corner is actually the stain from the chain staple,
which I've drawn on here. So this is where the book had a metal clip with a ring attached to it.
And because of its position, we know that this was the front or the left board of the binding.
So we can tell just from the stains and the position of the chain staple that this was at the front and pasted down to the inner face of this binding.
That's such an important point, I think isn't it, about how these have been curated in the Guardbook, but these fragments and how the, as you say,
the intention is to recreate what the original manuscript would have looked like,
and that's assumed to be the focus of interest and not the context of reuse,
even though that is just as interesting in a way, because what these fragments are telling us is not just about, you know,
we can look at the script and work out when and where it might have been written, but what's just as important as is when and where it was reused.
So when this book was no longer thought worthy of preservation, when it was given up for free use in this context, which, as you say, we can use.
If we didn't have the shelfmark, we might be able to use some of this evidence to put it in an Oxford context,
just from the nature of the the structure of the binding. Yes it's, but yes, a lovely example.
But our next example is a much stranger looking structure, isn't it?
Not really recognisable in a way, as a leaf - let me zoom in.
So this. This sort of holey, holey structure here, so can you, can you talk us through how this would have fitted into a binding?
Yes, so this is a, yes,
an odd looking sort of strange H shaped fragment that originally came from a single leaf or a leaf cut out of the manuscript.
But again, luckily, with my kind of sense of binding history,
what we might think is, where on earth was this? And if we think of the last fragment, would have been on the inner face of the board,
very visible, this would have been hidden within the binding.
So what we have here is something that was helped to reinforce the connection between the text block spine of the binding and the boards.
And actually what's now being mounted as one piece in use was actually cut in two.
So I think in the middle sort of comb, we can see the edge of where the two things have been joined.
And again, but I've got a model here of what it would have looked like.
And I think that's an odd thing as well.
But we know from other examples that this is what's known as a comb spine lining and would have been used,
you would have had two layers stuck to the spine of the of the binding with two sets of sewing supports.
And then these extensions would have been pasted either to the external face or the inner face of the board.
And just, just to show you one in. So here we've got one as a sort of model stuck.
You can see this double layer of spines that would have been stuck to the spine of the book and then the extensions on the inside.
Now, this is a sad, sad example that we've got no, no knowledge of where it comes from.
However, this kind of spine comb, spine lining can be localised to certain bits of Europe and at different periods.
And we know that they continue to be used much longer in France than anywhere else in Europe.
So even if we can't say which book or binding it came from, we can tell it's a small binding which would have had two or three sewing supports.
So a small format book. We have some indication of where it may have been used. From the adhesive on it,
we can say that it would have been an inboard binding rather than a limp structure.
So there's various clues, but but sadly, very little to go on.
But it does... no, so can we.
I mean, one thing perhaps is this, the comb binding structure not being something that we'd expect to find in a British binding.
Is it so we might. Yes.
More likely to be a continental French or Italian, but.
Yes. And then we've got that rather shocking but rather wonderful additional stain on it.
The last example we saw, which we know was lifted in 1901,
and there's a pencil inscription on it and and on the host binding
this one just has this rust stain in a characteristic mark of a paperclip.
So we can tell that for some,
presumably considerable, period in the 20th century, these two bits which have been removed from a binding, were clipped together.
Now, whether they were removed from a Bodleian binding or whether they were removed and then brought in for an opinion or were a donation,
we don't know. But it's yes, there was perhaps less care taken with,
with noting where they came from. Yes, it's very tantalising, this example, isn't it, because I mean,
not only is there the fact that we don't know where it was removed from, it just emphasises how important recordkeeping is in these contexts.
And so, so important not just to keep records, but really to keep records with the fragment themselves of, of where it's been removed from.
But also the text of this hasn't been identified, at least so far.
So the first example we looked at was quite well-known patristic text of Gregory the Great's Homilies on the Gospels.
But this is a sort of theological distinctions, but we haven't identified the text itself.
So it's, so it's tantalising in all sorts of ways. Yes.
And even though we have these Guardbooks, I presume there's there's still so much work to be done on them.
Yes, yes, exactly, because these were I mean, they've been put together over the 20th century,
catalogued mostly in the 1960s and as we'll, we'll say a bit later,
the identification of texts has got so much easier since then that I'm sure there are all sorts of discoveries
waiting to be made in these sorts of albums of texts that have yet to be identified or possibly new texts.
And that's I mean, that has historically as I think we will again talk about later,
that has been one of the main reasons for people to go hunting after fragments in hope of exciting new discoveries.
So we've got one last item to look at in this volume, which is another, a different structure.
Again, looking rather like a sort of a kit that you might get to just sort of fold something and and make a boat or something.
But clearly, that's not what's going on here. But perhaps Andrew, you could explain to us what is going on.
Yeah, well, here we've got this sort of strange, almost bat-shaped piece of parchment with the characteristic cuts and folds in it.
And we might think bat-shaped for Halloween. But no, what we have here is the cover of a binding.
So this was a parchment, piece of parchment that was recycled and folded around in the binding of a thing.
So what we, what we're looking at at the moment is the inner side of the parchment.
Again, if I look at my handy model, you can see as we start to fold in these flaps, it turns into something that's far more book shaped.
And you can imagine this folded around. This is life size, real size, a relatively small format book.
And again, we're fortunate to have a shelf mark for this.
So we know that this is a 1561 small format book printed in Lyon.
And we know that the, this manuscript fragment was lifted in 1932 at the instigation of the then keeper of Western Manuscripts at the Bodleian.
So here the other side, we can see what would have been on the outside of the binding.
So what what, was what was observable in 1932
and that's why it's got a sort of darker area on the spine where there's been more light damage and so on over the years.
But again, it's an early accession into the Bodleian and would have come in, small format book, coming in, a binding put on it,
probably near Lyon where it was first
produced and presumably where the first binder was, first owner was,
and it would have come into the Bodleian as a second hand book, 50 odd years old at that point.
Yes, you can see why, why someone might have been interested in it can't you, this tantalising,
obviously rather early script that they perhaps weren't able to to make a great deal of.
It's a copy of Augustine The City
of God, an early copy from the first half of the 19th century and geographically localised to France, northern France.
So that that fits pretty well with the later provenance.
And it's one of the manuscripts that the great German paleographer Bernard Bischoff included in his catalogue of all the 9th century manuscripts.
And a lot of those are fragments. And it just illustrates, as we were saying before,
how much fragments can have to contribute to our understanding of the written culture of Europe as a particular time.
Yes, it would be interesting to know how much could have been, you know, could it have been left in situ?
I mean, yes. Anyway. Shall we, shall we break for questions then?
Thank you both, Matthew and Andrew, that's brilliant. Yes, we've had a number of questions come in,
so if we start with some of the more general ones about the kind of practicalities of looking after the manuscripts and how the bindings were created,
we've had a question. Do you know what kind of glue was used in the binding, in the kind of putting together of the manuscripts?
One for you Andrew maybe? Well, a mixture. So we have both protein glue, so sort of animal glues, but we also see a lot of paste.
So wheat flour, often wheat flour with a lot of bran in so cooked up, almost like wallpaper paste and used.
And yes, you'll see, you'll see predominantly paste used, but sometimes a mixture of animal glue and and paste and sometimes animal glue,
particularly used on the spine of books where they wanted it very - kind of - a lot of grab and very sticky adhesive.
Thank you and a very general question, how the manuscripts are archived - in places with a special temperature, presumably.
So just kind of generally how you look after these things in the Bodleian I guess. Yes, we have,
I mean, these are kept within the stacks here at the Weston Library.
And we've got both climate control to control the temperature, which is, you know,
it's a comfortable range, but on the cool side, but more importantly, to control the relative humidity.
So the amount of moisture in the air. Brilliant, thank you. And so moving on to the fragments, specifically, a question,
do you know how many fragments, those fragments have been identified within the collection?
Is it possible to even put a number on it?
Well, in this particular book, I don't think I could tell you off the top of my head, but maybe maybe two thirds, I suppose, perhaps.
And in general, of the fragments in the, in the library,
it would be a much smaller figure because many of them are still in situ, in manuscripts and in early printed books.
We don't even know about all the ones that exist in manuscripts and early printed books.
So there's there's a lot of work to be done on our fragments. Excellent, a lifetime's work.
And one participant has asked whether we have any Hebrew fragments amongst the binding fragments in the Guardbooks or in any of the manuscripts,
I suppose. Yes, indeed, we do not in this Guardbook, which has been stored sort of thematically by both language and subject.
So they're all Latin and they're all theological.
However, we do have Hebrew fragments and they're interesting.
There's one I know of that is, was removed from another 16th century Italian book printed in Latin.
So those, yes, the cross-cultural fertilisation of where fragments were used, where they were available is a fascinating subject.
And then, also are there any fragments of unknown old English poetry that you've come across maybe.
No, no. And I think that that's one area where if you, if you did find that,
you would tell someone who was an expert in this and fairly quickly it would be published and everyone would know about it.
So, no, if anyone does find a fragment of old English, do do tell people as soon as you can, because everyone will be very excited.
But no, no fragments that we know of, of old English.
There may well be fragments of middle English that identify (the lights are going off
so I need to pace around). But you never know what you might find, things do, things do turn up.
Lovely. Thank you. So we'll come back to some of the other questions a bit later on.
But I think we'll move on to our next manuscript now, please. I might just say, as I close that one up, that we added to it very recently,
so fragments that we have from various sources or fragments that are purchased
as well do do still go in these Guardbooks, that they are actively maintained.
But our next volume is something a little bit different.
So the fragments that we've been looking at up til now have come out of, as far as we know, mostly 16th century bindings,
and that perhaps is what most people would think of as being the great age of manuscript recycling when there
were lots of new printed books that need to be bound and there was a lot of manuscript waste available,
either because libraries were deaccessioning as their books became became outmoded in the face of printed books,
or as with the Protestant Reformation's manuscripts, monastic libraries were being dissolved and manuscripts came onto the market that way.
But we do find manuscript recycling in mediaeval bindings as well
and it's very interesting to think about who was deaccessioning, as it were,
books from mediaeval libraries in the mediaeval period itself and what that can tell us about reading habits and intellectual history.
So we're going to look at an example of that now, this is a 15th century book and maybe,
Andrew, you want to sort of admire the binding a bit before we before we dive in?
Yes. I mean, it's beautiful to see this sort of 15th century German binding, but what's for me so interesting is it maintains various scars.
So we've got bosses that have been removed, clasps that have been removed.
So showing us that the books to continue to be used as their sort of shelving in storage changed, have had things removed or added to.
So the kind of scars and stains we've seen with fragments are also found on bindings
and part of our job is to interpret these tantalising kind of glimpses of their past history.
But it was also interesting as you opened up, Matthew, just to see here we have, so here we have a fragment that's in situ still.
So this is a very similar, was once a space down, was once stuck to the inner face of this board, as we can see that that's been lifted.
But for me, the thing that that I find lovely about this is it's upside down and, and makes you think about the earlier, the
person who commissioned this binding, and the binder who put it in, had no worry about this thing being upside down.
The idea, it didn't jar with them.
And again, the sense of things in motion really and how we might view fragments, must be so different to how they were viewed at the time.
They were clearly seen as an important functioning part of the binding and, and,
again, these sort of parchment paste downs, and I've got a model here,
but they just as you can see, as you open the book, it, the whole thing begins to move.
And this, the importance of the function and the use of parchment within this, would have been so
important to the binder that they are clearly selecting it for that rather than which way up it was,
or I'm sure they have no thought at all about what the text was.
That's an interesting point to think about the structure, isn't it, because we might think that doing this with a paste down,
so lifting the paste down from the board so that both sides are legible,
you know, that might seem like having our cake and eating it in that way of making the text available without disturbing the binding too much.
But from what you're saying, we really are actually disturbing the blinding when we do that.
I mean, this one's in, luckily in good condition, but quite often where we see that elements of the binding have been lifted, certainly fragments,
you get this chain reaction, that the stresses which were once shared across many parts of the, you know,
beautifully balanced structure of the mediaeval binding becomes lopsided and then the sewing support start to break down.
The covering letter breaks down. So the hunt for fragments
in many ways, causes, has caused, so much damage to the total mediaeval object of manuscript and binding.
I'll say a bit about what the text is,
because this is one of the interesting cases when fragments do tell us something really quite new and exciting that we might not have known otherwise.
So when we, this is one of the books that Helen mentioned that were digitised for the Polonsky Project recently, and when we were cataloguing it,
the fragment leaped out to a certain extent because of the sort of formal grade of script and the very expansive layout,
which was fairly unusual things to see on fragments. Often they're,
they're not such a high grade.
And we knew there was a fragment in there and it had been described as having a theological text, but the text hadn't been identified.
And as I said, it was much harder to identify texts until relatively recently when electronic databases became available.
And nowadays it's often fairly straightforward. So it was quite easy to identify this text as a copy of one of Dante's texts,
not one of his vernacular poems for which he's most famous but his Latin treatise, Monarchia, on papal and imperial government.
And that in itself is quite an exciting discovery because they were not very many manuscripts known of the Monarchia, only 20.
So to add a new one is, it's quite interesting in itself.
And one written in this rather formal way of script is also quite unusual for Monarchian manuscripts.
So this was probably a high grade manuscript, is telling us something we didn't know before about the audience of that text.
And because of its position in a German binding, it's also telling us something about where the text was read.
So the main book is a paperwork dated 1445, and the binding is roughly contemporary, we know, from the stamps used on it.
So we know that the book was written and bound in Erfurt in Germany in the mid 15th century.
And so we know that was somewhere where the Dante text was circulating and that hadn't again been known before.
So there were no copies that we knew of from Germany. So, again, that's adding something significant to the story of that text circulation.
And we also have, even more interestingly, this sort of marginal commentary, which, again, only survives in two other manuscripts.
So we've got, again, another witness to what's in fact, a very rare and unusual text.
So this this fragment turns out to be potentially pretty important for the understanding of all those texts.
Yes, that concludes my discussion of that fragment, so maybe that would be a good time for questions, Helen.
Thank you Matthew. Yeah, just to pick up on your point, Andrew, about the structure of books and how important fragments were,
we've had a question about the kind of general rules that are followed by the Bodleian at the moment.
So is there a policy of always leaving fragments in situ or trying, or can they sometimes be removed?
Or what are the guidelines that you work to now? I mean, as with everything in the Bodleian, we don't have hard and fast guidelines.
So what we would do is in most cases, yes, we would like to leave fragments in place. Occasionally during conservation
it becomes necessary to lift certain things with spine linings occasionally.
So some things might be lifted,
but we would now ensure that we restore them with the original manuscript or the host volume and document where they came from.
So, yes, in my time I have lifted a few, but not many. And I think the days of sort of hunting and lifting
in a more sort of active way, we've moved beyond that and actually some, some recent projects have been looking at
trying to catalogue what we have within some of our collections of Incunabula,
so early printed books. But I think Matthew hopefully will will back me up on this,
that I think the realisation is that it's good for the fragment to have the context of
where it was used and it's good for the host volume to have the fragment left with it,
if at all possible. Yes, I think
because when you remove the fragment,
you never really know what evidence you're sort of damaging do you, because you even, you might sort of document everything you can,
but there may be something you don't document that emerges in 20 years time to be a very
important feature of the binding structure that will tell us a lot about the provenance.
And that might be something that was lost by the removal of a fragment.
So, yes, I think the trend is very much just to not intervene at all if we can avoid it.
And we do have, we do have modern techniques that will let us see much more fragments without, without acting invasively.
But that's a very welcome development of modern technology over the last couple of decades.
Thank you. And one more question just on this specific text.
Do you know why such a high status text like Dante's would have been chosen for use in a binding?
Well, it's a real mystery in a way, isn't it and a great question.
I mean, I think we have to assume that it wasn't in demand or it wouldn't have ended up there.
One possibility is that it was, it was a sort of controversial text
I suppose. It had, offered a very particular view of the papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor.
And it's possible that that wasn't, you know, acceptable intellectually, perhaps in the environment where it ended up.
Thank you.
I'm aware of time, so I do want to move on to our final manuscripts and there are a few questions that we'll pick up again on the end, at the end.
So thank you. I'll pass back to you.
We're cheating a bit from Andrew with this last manuscript, because it's not in fact, it doesn't have any fragments in it itself,
but it shows the process of fragmentation and sort of going on all the way through it
which people can perhaps see if I try turn the pages and zoom back a little bit.
And this is, this is a manuscript that, again, has recently been digitised.
And it came up to conservation ahead of digitisation, ahead of photography,
because it's in this fragmentary state and had so many cuts and so on that some of the leaves were curling and folding over themselves.
So one of my colleagues, Alice Evans, worked to relax some of those so that could be digitised.
But as I started looking at it, I got more and more excited because, you know, we're used to seeing fragments from the other side.
So we're either in still in bindings or in Guardbooks and so on and collections.
But here I thought, wow, have we got the kind of quarry, the mine where fragments were coming from?
And I got very excited thinking, could this have been in the corner of a binding workshop or something like that?
And have we seen something that was being chopped up? And then at some point somebody said, hang on, no, let's hold onto that, that manuscript.
And that's sort of an intriguing thought for me. But what's been so interesting talking to Matthew is that it's, it's an even more complex story
it's got to tell than that. We have, we know it came into the Bodleian Library in the 1620s or 1630s with Archbishop Laud's gift of manuscripts.
Yeah, and I'm just zooming in on the bottom here where we can see whoever it was that did the slicing to
to take off the very ample margins sometimes got a bit carried away and cut off some of the text.
And what's particularly interesting is that you can see the text has been rewritten above,
so showing that the volume was still in use after the parchment was removed.
So, as you say, the sort of natural assumption is that this was just sort of lying in a corner and no one was really interested in it.
But it does it does still seem that where, where the text has been damaged like this, it is usually overwritten.
So the volume can still be used. And it does still seem to have been an active use, sort of later marginal notes as well,
you can see. And we have, I mean in places some of these leaves have then been repaired, and it's interesting, once you start going through it,
you see they're carefully going for blank bits of parchment and avoiding the natural flaws and manufacturing marks that we find on some skins.
So where there's a natural flaw, there's been a - I mean that's been left in place, where the leaves either side have got the blank areas removed.
And that's an interesting thought. So we've got carefully you know removal of blank parchment here.
So the chances of us ever finding these fragments
with evidence that it came from this manuscript is is virtually nil
one would imagine. If they've survived, who knows?
I presume they were used for writing either small documents or notes or perhaps by
the institution that had this this manuscript at some point in the Middle Ages.
Yes, I suppose it just reminds us that parchment, parchment was an expensive and sometimes scarce commodity.
And I mean, you can see they've got a great deal of if this book, haven't they?
So we're just going to finish with something very similar.
But where we have some actual evidence of when the slicing and dicing took place.
And it's it's not mediaeval, though, a little spoiler. It's worryingly more recent than that.
So I'll just need to zoom in a little bit.
If we look at this little book of cookery recipes,
you can see how very similarly the mostly blank margins at the side here to begin with and then later on at the bottom have all been cut out.
In a very similar way to say that German manuscript we just looked at, but we know, don't we, Andrew,
what was, what was going on here because of a later note at the beginning?
Yes. And we've almost caught it mid-dismemberment, which is, you know, that we don't get this evidence very often.
I don't know if people can read that, but I'll read it out.
It says 'to the possession of this curious manuscript, I am indebted to the kindness of Mr Smith, apothecary of Chertsey,
who rescued it from the hands of the keeper of a chandler shop in that town,
who had begun to cut it in shreds to make labels'. So that is what was going on.
And yes, it looks like this, this is the point at which Francis Douce the collector who gave it to the Bodleian,
got hold of the manuscript and saved the remainder of its margins.
And that I mean, it's interesting, 1787.
I mean, it's surprising to me, I would have thought there'd be an antiquarian interest and value to the manuscript at that point,
but clearly still being used in a chandler's shop, possibly to wrap up candles or whatever.
And important to us, I mean, fragments survive in a library context within bindings,
but this gives us some hint as perhaps the last manuscript does, that so much must have been used, for what we know was used for other purposes.
The vast majority of which don't survive. So what we have within book structures is a sort of tantalising evidence.
And they're in libraries with the kind of scholars who are interested in identifying them.
But yeah, who knows? Who knows where late 18th century chandler shop labels might be found today.
Yes, very striking, isn't it, that, as you say, 1787, you'd think a book like this would have been would have been worth a fair amount,
but obviously it was acquired cheaply enough to make its reuse an economical thing to do.
Lovely, thank you both so much. It's been fascinating to see the fragments in different places and being used in different ways.
We've got a few questions to finish off with just about the particular idea of people taking the blank sections, sections of parchment.
We've had a question. Might someone have been trying to eliminate marginal glosses by taking out those strips?
Well, I suppose that's possible if they'd been very controversial glosses,
but I think it's probably unlikely because we do have pages where there were annotations left which weren't removed.
And it's, it's also not the sort of manuscript where you would expect to find extensive glosses and on the pages that we have.
And there's a clarification, apologies, sorry there's a clarification,
apologies, that their comment was relating to the Laud manuscript rather than this specific one.
But I think probably, I think probably the same, the same factors apply in that it would be very
unusual to have a sort of a lot of dense annotation all around the page in that sort of manuscript.
That would explain why so much of it has been removed, because on so many pages, it has taken the parchment completely up to the edge of the text.
And indeed that would probably not be necessary if it was a question of removing the the occasional annotation.
OK, that makes thank you. And so a few more general questions and one about looking after the manuscripts.
I've got a question. How do you relax a manuscript? I'm not quite sure what that means. It sounds like a trick question, but one for Andrew, I think.
Well, the old joke is, how do you relax a parchment? With alcohol or water, just like the conservator! If we do have sort of creases or pleats,
you can gently humidify parchment either along the crease or over it, and then as it dries, restrain it slightly.
So, yes. So if occasionally we have to dis-bind an entire parchment manuscript to repair it and then before rebinding it and for those,
we sometimes just relax with gentle humidity and then pin out to dry - tension them, the retension them as they dry.
And another question, how do you start searching for the original text on a fragment?
That must be a tough thing to do.
Well, I mean, the honest answer is you, these days, you just put it into a search engine and you've got a pretty good chance of finding something.
If that doesn't work, there are quite a few specialised databases that you can search.
So all the the sort of works of mediaeval theology up to the sort of early 13th century are all available in online databases.
And those are quite easy to search so that there's just a lot of electronic text that can be quite quickly searched these days.
Of course, the thing with fragments is you don't have the beginning of your text,
which is what people usually use to identify where you've got a sort of random chunk.
So your chance of finding in a list of works is much smaller than they would be if you had the beginning.
But because there are these databases, it still is fairly straightforward often to find a text.
That's not to say you can find everything but you can find a lot. Yes. So we've had a question.
Do you ever find a fragment you cannot identify - I expect the answer's yes. Yes, absolutely.
So that the comb binding that we looked at. I did, I spent half an hour,
I mean, I didn't spend very long with it, but I spent half an hour with it yesterday trying to identify it and didn't get very far.
So absolutely. Yes. And coming back to the specifics of the most recent ones we've been looking at, we've had a suggestion,
could it be possible that the fragments of parchment were used to reliquary, labels thinking of the mediaeval context, so to label relics?
Well, I suppose there might have been, yes. OK, I say, yes, I think yes, possibly label, labels as to the Douce thing, that's a plausible usage,
I guess they would have needed a lot of reliquaries to use up all the parchment from the Laud.
Yes, but that's, that's the sort of thing one could imagine that being used for. Absolutely.
And then a question more generally about the fragments in the collection.
Have you come across any ancient Greek manuscripts in the fragments that you found?
That's a good question, and I don't, I'm sure that we do have some I, I don't know them very well personally.
It's possible that and I also don't know very much about the sort of Greek binding tradition,
but it's possible that they didn't make so much use of manuscript waste. I don't know if
Andrew, you can comment on that. I can actually a little, not necessarily from the Bodleian's collections,
but I did some work, conservation work, in the monastery of St Catherine's in Sinai,
which has a fantastic collection of manuscripts, most of which are in early bindings.
And yes, we see the same sort of thing. So and leaves, repair patches, quite a lot of spine fold used for sort of repair.
So, yes, that same recycling. So yes, that's been the same sort of interesting.
And of course palimpsest, so parchment that has been erased,
its first text erased and then written on again and some of that used and then recycled as fragments.
So you get layers and layers of them. And a question, what is the most interesting fragment you've ever come across?
I asked you first Matthew and then Andrew. I think for me it's that Dante fragment that I showed you,
which I mean with the recent things tend to sort of stay in your mind anyway.
But I think that is still the the one with the most sort of textual and historical significance.
What about you, Andrew? Well, for me, I've just been working on a manuscript that was re-covered in black velvet as it entered Henry VIII's library,
and it has fragments with music on from Worcester that were lifted some point around about 1900.
And are now in another Guardbook. And the order of them is it has been sort of put into the order that they may have been in the original manuscript.
So I've been trying to work out how they were used as end leaves within this binding, trying to work out how to repair it, conserve it.
So there I've spent quite a lot of time trying to match up wormholes, going through the damage through them.
So, I mean, not even looking at the text, just the holes through them to try and work out which order they were in,
which one was closest to the wooden board, where did the worm come out or what did it chew.
So that's maybe an unknown. Yes, an odd favourite, but an enjoyable activity anyway or whodunnit.
Fantastic. Thank you. And so we've had one final question. Are external visitors to the Bodleian able to see these collections of fragments?
I think you've inspired everybody to want to see not the complete manuscripts, but the fragments.
Is that possible, too? Well, yes, they are.
They are mainly, they're classed as manuscripts, they're part of our normal manuscript collection.
So anyone with a, you need an 'A' category reader card,
which you sort of get by applying to the admissions office for and by explaining why you want to consult special collections material.
But once you've got that 'A' card, you can come in and you can order any material from our collections, including these Guardbooks.
And and you can absolutely get to work on them.
And just I mean, if you're, if you don't want to come and do that, I do know that our next major exhibition at the Bodleian includes some fragments.
I had a look at some that's going to be in our North Sea Crossings exhibition.
So there will be some on display from later this year.
Brilliant. Thank you very much. So I think that brings us to a good place to finish.
So let me thank everyone for joining us today. It's been a real pleasure to be able to connect with the friends of the Bodleian from
all over the world and share your curiosity and enthusiasm from afar.
Thank you, Matthew Holford and Andrew Honey and our behind the scenes technical team, Karen, Neil and Rebecca.
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