Working with liturgical manuscripts, part 14 - a puzzle in progress

Last week my colleague Jakob Povl Holck and I were on an excursion to the library of Roskilde to investigate a manuscript fragment that was used to bind a volume by the Danish astronomer Tyco Brahe. I had seen pictures of the fragment before, but I was eager to get a chance to have a closer look and to get a better sense of how the book was bound and how the fragment had been folded in the process. I was also eager to look for details not easily caught by a camera, such as small letters hidden where the fragment folds around the edge of the book - letters that might seem inconsequential, but which can sometimes yield just enough information to take an identification of the text from likely to certain.

We were hosted by two of the librarians who generously and kindly let us examine the fragments in all the ways we deemed necessary. Unfortunately, we quickly found that the tight binding of the book discouraged too much poking and prying in order to get to the details hidden in the inner folds, and neither could we open the book without great care so as not to crack the vellum. As a consequence, although I did get a much better sense of the fragment and its text, I returned from Roskilde with an imperfect understanding of how the manuscript folio had once appeared in its undismembered state. Such an understanding is crucial in order to understand the order of the text and thus understand the fragment as part of a lost unit.

Karen Brahes bibliotek, J.1

Karen Brahes bibliotek, J.1

Karen Brahes bibliotek, J.1

 

Since I had been unable to photograph the book in such a way that both the cover - and thus most of the fragment - could be seen in its entirety, I had to resort to a very old-fashioned way to understand the coherence of the fragment, namely by sort out the individual pieces and put them together like a puzzle. This I did by printing some of the pictures we had taken, then cutting away or folding most of the background. The most challenging part was the inside of the covers, where the left and right folds belonged to the opposite side of the folio as the centre, and therefore had to be separated and then moved about. The end result looked like this.

Reconstruction, based on pictures by myself and Jakob Povl Holck

In the present blogpost I do not wish to say much more about the details of this fragment, as that is a work in progress and there is much that remains to be ascertained. Here, it mainly serves as a little glimpse into the combination of digital and analogue labour that is required in order to research manuscript fragments while ensuring that they are not mangled in the process.