[HN Gopher] Archive of medieval books and manuscripts discovered...
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Archive of medieval books and manuscripts discovered in Romanian
church
Author : quakeguy
Score : 170 points
Date : 2023-05-25 11:32 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.medievalists.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.medievalists.net)
| dailyplanet wrote:
| The next step would be digitizing the books and manuscripts so
| scholars can collectively research the finding.
|
| https://www.medievalists.net/?s=digitizing&submit=Search
|
| I wonder what the cost of this digitization process would be and
| what research labs can render this service.
| voynich wrote:
| I was just thinking about that. In my opinion, this find is
| sorta useless if these aren't digitalized and shared publicly.
|
| To my knowledge, digitalization can be expensive, because they
| need hardware for high quality scans, and they have to be
| careful not to damage these books any further. I guess it all
| depends on the situation.
| Avicebron wrote:
| apropo username, having taken a crack at pulling relevant
| information out of scanned documents I agree that scan
| quality is very important (while often lengthy and expensive)
| especially if someone is trying to derive meaningful
| information from a digital copy without the physical copy to
| do a comparison with.
|
| And from the look of the picture those books are massive and
| probably very delicate.
|
| EDIT: to add a bit to the expensive part of this, it's
| expensive even with the willingness and resources to get it
| done, it's hard but unfortunately to even convince someone to
| dedicate these resources is a hurdle.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Ah, baloney. If you can open the book, you can photograph
| it with your iphone. You'll find the result answers your
| concerns. Try it with any of your books.
| foobarian wrote:
| I'm wondering the other side of it: given how fragile digital
| storage and peripherals are, are there efforts to transcribe
| books like this onto archival paper with archival inks? Seems
| it really would be kinda fun to have a modern day monastery
| copying books by hand like in the ancient times...
| [deleted]
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I'm not sure how common they are or precisely where it came
| from but I know someone with a hand-copied prayer book from
| the indian melankara church. I'm not sure when the original
| was made but this one was copied in the 1960s so is nearly a
| minor relic in its own right.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > given how fragile digital storage and peripherals are
|
| Post it on the web. Lots of people will inevitably make
| copies, ensuring its survival.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Your phone camera, hand held, is plenty good enough to digitize
| each page. Even if they don't lay flat. You could pay a student
| to just photograph each page. The cost is minimal.
|
| Before anyone says "this will never work! It must be done by
| $$$$$ professionals! It requires $$$$ equipment!" just pick a
| book, any book, off your bookshelf, open it up, and take a
| phone photo.
|
| P.S. It works better with daylight providing enough light
| through the windows.
| joshuahedlund wrote:
| You make a good point, but there also could be more to it
| than that:
|
| - Need to make sure the photographers are careful not to
| damage fragile pages
|
| - Need a system of organization (syncing ten thousand
| default-named iphone pics with no labels is not ideal)
|
| - You might be ignoring important differences between modern
| published books on your bookshelf and these materials (ex.
| maybe font is not same size, maybe font is not modern
| English, maybe characters are not printed consistently, maybe
| pages are dirty, all of which could impact OCR-friendliness
| of an iphone pic compared to something else
|
| - There might even be valuable information in markings below
| the topmost visible layer which could be revealed by scanning
| equipment (especially for example if pages are stuck
| together)
|
| And that's just off the top of my head, without real domain
| knowledge.
| WalterBright wrote:
| It's not about OCR or dirt. It's about taking an image. I
| doubt OCR would work on any of them, whether you use a
| $$$$$ archivist to photograph the pages or not.
|
| As for below the topmost layer, you're right, an iphone
| camera won't do it. But worrying about that comes much,
| much later.
| xhevahir wrote:
| When I saw "Romanian" I figured the medieval texts were Byzantine
| and therefore might contain ancient Greek fragments. Since the
| library belonged instead to Transylvanian Saxons, that's probably
| not the case.
| ggm wrote:
| How exciting to find hoarded/forgotten texts in an age when non
| destructive palimpsest analysis through modern imaging techniques
| has improved leaps and bounds.
|
| Who knows what lies underneath the top layers of usage?
|
| Texts were copied laboriously by hand. Each one carrys stories of
| where it came from. It could inform trade links from monastic
| scribe houses across the globe. It could have DNA fragments of
| value.
|
| It almost certainly has pictures of cats in it, somewhere. Doing
| strange things with snails.
| tomcam wrote:
| I was with you until the last sentence, and then I got lost
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| Can I ask about your reference to cats and snails?
| zimbu668 wrote:
| Can't speak for OP, but I've heard snails are a recurring
| theme in medieval manuscripts:
| https://justhistoryposts.com/2017/11/13/medieval-
| marginalia-...
| morkalork wrote:
| Also killer rabbits
| Vvector wrote:
| Five is right out.
| zubiaur wrote:
| For your amusement: https://twitter.com/WeirdMedieval
| https://twitter.com/WeirdMedieval/status/1653758543244279808
| dbtc wrote:
| And the writing itself might be of interest ;)
| primitivesuave wrote:
| Imagine finding an ancient/medieval text discussing evolution
| by natural selection, the indivisible nature of the atom,
| heliocentricity, and the existence of a unified theory of
| physics, all written by an author who lived in the 1st century
| BCE. Such was the discovery of 15th century manuscript
| collector Poggio Bracciolini, who discovered a surviving copy
| of De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things [1]) in a
| Benedictine monastery. The lost work of Lucretius inspired many
| Enlightenment thinkers and led people to challenge the
| orthodoxies of that time.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_rerum_natura
| listenfaster wrote:
| Exciting to see so much music notation in one of the shots in the
| article. Maybe we'll hear something from someone undiscovered?
| pvitz wrote:
| It is a pity that Aristotle's second book of "Poetics" doesn't
| seem to be among the books found there.
| COGlory wrote:
| The last known copy of that burned with a Benedictine monastary
| in the 14th century
| jq-r wrote:
| Nice reference, "The Name of The Rose" is my favourite book.
| A masterpiece.
| nologic01 wrote:
| Coincidentally on other news today people in Emilia Romana are
| rushing to salvage old books stored in the basements of flooded
| churches.
| petre wrote:
| Whoever hid the maniscripts into the tower knew what they were
| doing, right? Saxons are very practical minded people. Their
| fortified church towers have a room for storing bacon, so if
| they had to take refuge in the fortified church, they also had
| a supply of food on hand to survive. Romanians by contrast
| would take refuge in the forest and rebuild everything after it
| was destroyed by the invaders. That's why some of their homes,
| barns and stables are improvised to a certain degree, because
| the mindset that they're going to be destroyed anyway is still
| present in the collective unconscious.
|
| This discovery is very exciting. The manuscripts pictured in
| the article look like music partitures.
| aizyuval wrote:
| It's so refreshing to be reminded that history is still lying
| around us, waiting to be found. Waiting for the right folks.
| kmote00 wrote:
| Speaking as one who grew up on the West Coast of the U.S., in
| towns where the oldest buildings are rarely measured in more
| than decades, I'm quite envious of those of you who live in
| places where civilization has been active for hundreds or
| thousands of years!
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| oh... buddy....
| nwatson wrote:
| https://www.britannica.com/technology/cliff-dwelling
| hutzlibu wrote:
| So is the future ...
| luxuryballs wrote:
| I collect old books and I am drooling right now. My oldest are
| only 1860s.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| Do you do anything special to preserve them?
|
| Does your local weather cooperate or hinder your collection ?
| luxuryballs wrote:
| Nope, no different from safely keeping any other books, but I
| might if I had even older ones depending on their condition.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I have a Bible from 1800 or so, and a couple others from 1870
| or so. I store them in the comic book archival bags, and keep
| them in a part of the house that says at a constant
| temperature.
| dhosek wrote:
| My oldest book dates to the 18th century. It's not my most
| valuable book (I'm not sure which is, but my guess would be the
| signed limited edition of Graham Greene's _Monsignor Quixote_
| would be it).
|
| I keep the valuable books on a special shelf so that after I
| die, my kids will know that those books should probably not be
| sent to the library book sale.
| phillc73 wrote:
| Also love old books. I have a first edition (1791) copy of
| Introduction to a General Stud Book[1]. That'd be my oldest.
|
| Also love old maps.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Stud_Book
| luxuryballs wrote:
| that is so cool!! what a find
| nickpp wrote:
| I love smoky old churches. Sadly so many of them (especially in
| off-the-beaten-path places) were constructed with wood and
| various accidents (candles, short-circuits) burned them to the
| ground. Not the same even if fully reconstructed...
| petre wrote:
| Some of the old Saxon fortified churches, like Biertan for
| instance are in the Unesco heritage fund. There is also one in
| Viscri where King Charles is expected to visit in two weeks or
| so. He has a holiday home there and it seems that he has quite
| enjoyed the place for some time. Of course everything is fully
| booked now. The authorities have recently closed the village to
| motor vehicles, in order to protect it and preserve its beauty.
| You could visit if you ever get the chance. I think the last
| week of July or the first week of August is the Haferland Week1
| in the area, if you also want to get a taste of local
| traditions. In Biertan there was a horror movie film festival
| in August, called Full Moon, but it was paused, then delayed
| due to the pandemic. Valea Viilor has a other Unesco fortified
| church that is lesser known but no less spectacular. It's close
| to Medias, where the manuscripts were found. The other places
| that are not in the heritage fund are rather sleepy and you
| have to go on a quest for the keeper of the keys to the church.
| We had a week long summer project to photograph these churches
| in 2004.
|
| 1. https://haferland.ro/en/the-haferland-week/
| nunobrito wrote:
| In my home town many churches from the 11th century to the 16th
| century got razed to the ground to build theaters or converted
| into shopping malls by liberals in the 18th century.
|
| It was done in the name of rationality since religion does not
| exist for them, meant to free the people from gods. As end
| result, those theaters were private and got abandoned.
|
| Those shopping malls are now the new churches of a society that
| now instead of worshiping a god in heavens is worshiping the
| god of money. It would have been saner to respect old churches
| and preserve our patrimony/cultural heritage.
| prox wrote:
| Is this Paris? Only city I could think of with your
| description. Because there were no shopping malls in the 18th
| century. The precursor to shopping malls were bazaars which
| are very old. So that part of your comment seems not
| chronologically and terminology accurate.
| fein wrote:
| Judging by the name of the parent, I'd say Portugal.
| VK538FY wrote:
| The French revolution took place at the end of the 18th
| century and I'm sure that a lot of churches in Paris (or
| any French city) were demolished in a big FU to God. I
| can't recall something similar having taken place in
| Portugal at the time. Or anywhere else.
| prometheus76 wrote:
| This happened everywhere that the Soviet Union "spread"
| to. Churches were demolished, desecrated, or burned. Some
| were re-purposed, but many were destroyed.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| church politics were not entirely innocent in this either
| Bayart wrote:
| Official anti-clericalism and state atheism lasted for a
| very short period of time, not nearly enough to do any
| damage to the churches save for surface vandalism and
| pillaging of the statuary, furniture etc.
|
| The great victims of the Revolution are the monasteries
| and the castles. The monasteries were officially
| dissolved (in a movement similar to what had happened in
| England under Henry VIII), their land redistributed and
| their buildings sold for stone. The same happened to
| aristocratic holdings and most Medieval castles that
| somehow managed to survive until then were destroyed over
| the first half of the 19th c.
|
| That's how we've lost some of the most iconic monuments
| of Western civilization (I'm in particular thinking of
| Cluny, whose archives were burnt, manuscripts vandalized
| and stolen, stones parted out).
| Bayart wrote:
| There's nothing of the sort in Paris. Religious and
| aristocratic monuments suffered tremendously between the
| Revolution and the early days of conservancy, but for the
| most part churches were given back to religious occupations
| once the revolutionary heat went away.
| throw7 wrote:
| This happens all over. Here is one near me that was
| demolished and turned into a grocery store:
|
| https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Final-court-
| battle-o...
|
| I just want to say it doesn't have to be this way, but it
| is the way it is. In this specific case, I wondered why
| didn't Rome help support the maintenance of it's own; but
| I'm not really in tune with the vagaries of how the
| catholic diocese work across the world.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I am in no way religious, but I have a lot of respect for
| religious architecture. I suspect the desire to respect
| and glorify 'the divine' leads to designs that are
| aesthetically pleasing in a unique way that I can't quite
| describe.
| bombcar wrote:
| Church building maintenance is a huge portion of most
| dioceses' expenses, and with dwindling parishes and lack
| of funds, they simply can't keep all of them open. Some
| of these beautiful buildings cost more in maintenance
| each year than it would be to build a newer, more modern
| one that was sized correctly for the current number of
| parishioners.
|
| Much of Europe has already gone through this; many (but
| not all) of the churches you can visit in Europe have
| significant state support because they're historical and
| touristic.
|
| Sometimes the diocese gets enough people interested in
| "saving" an old church that they can cover the
| maintenance for another year, decade, etc, but we're
| talking millions of dollars.
|
| Rome supplies some funds, but not much and they're almost
| always used for missionary work or charity, etc. Peter's
| Pence is one example: https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/
| secretariat_state/obolo_s...
|
| The Catholic Church appears as one big institution run by
| an absolute monarch, but it is much more like a fiefdom
| run by local bishops with a king who _can_ if he really
| works at it, depose one. And the parishes under the
| bishops are similarly somewhat independent. The canon
| laws covering it can be seen here:
| https://canonlaw.ninja/?nums=1254-1310 (note that the
| bishop "taxes" the parishes to support the diocesan
| activities, this is usually done as an "annual Catholic
| appeal" which transfers money from the rich parishes to
| the poor parishes, usually the ones with schools). A
| parish financial committee is established by
| https://canonlaw.ninja/?nums=537 but the pastor has some
| pretty powerful leeway in executing his duty as he sees
| fit.
|
| Even many Catholics don't realize that their favorite
| "old parish church" is often kept afloat by donations
| from _one or two_ old parishioners. The old couple
| handing out donuts after Mass may be donating a million a
| year to keep the parish school running, and you may only
| ever find out if you dig into the non-profit filings. As
| an example, a local (well regarded) private Catholic
| school K-12 has $4m in tuition income, and $2m in
| donations, with the rest from "other" which includes
| selling tickets to games, merchandise, etc. Of that $7m,
| almost $4m goes to salaries, and about $1m to building
| and maintenance.
|
| Find your local parish and search for "annual report" and
| you can see more.
| JackFr wrote:
| Priests worry about saving souls. Pastors worry about
| replacing boilers.
| dhosek wrote:
| Our local parish had bad damage from a wind storm during
| Holy Week and has been closed ever since. The school
| building, which currently hosts a non-parochial school
| (where my kids go), is being shut down by the archdiocese
| at the end of the school year because the maintenance
| costs have grown excessive (it was a bit of a problem for
| the school because they only learned this in November and
| had assumed that they would have the lease renewed for at
| least one year at the end of this school year). While the
| pastor of the parish (which is a merger of this parish
| and another one about a mile away) has promised that the
| church will be reopened, I'm skeptical. This parish was
| the most moribund of the four parishes in the suburb
| where I live and sentiment aside (it's where my wife and
| I were married and our kids baptized), it's hard to
| justify keeping this parish alive (worth noting is that
| it's the only one of the four that no longer had its
| parish school open--when they shut it down, they had
| around 50 students total enrolled in the school).
| throw7 wrote:
| Thanks. That's really useful.
|
| Side note: I see from the canonlaw.ninja site that not
| even the "universal" church can't help but get into the
| copyright fight also. ;D _wink_
|
| "Canon 1. This document is temporarily unavailable due to
| a cease and desist from the Canon Law Society of America.
| We are hoping for a solution in the near future. cf. 1983
| CLC 1"
| digikazi wrote:
| I do as well, which is why when I went to Athens for two weeks
| last September, I very much looked forward to lots of smoky old
| orthodox churches. Alas, it wasn't to be: the vast majority of
| churches I saw looked brand new and as if they had been
| designed by MacDonald's. Clearly the church has money - and the
| imagination/vision of petty shopkeepers.
| riffraff wrote:
| AFAIU most big churches in Athens were converted to mosques
| during the ottoman empire, and then they were destroyed
| rather than being converted back.
|
| The only ones that survived are the small ones which were
| never converted, and which you can still find around the
| city.
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