A princess's psalter recovered? Pieces of a 1,000-year-old manuscript found

Phys dot org ^ | January 11, 2024 | Leiden University

[SunkenCiv]

Many books were printed and bound in the 16th and 17th centuries. Bookbinders used parchment to strengthen their book bindings; that material was expensive and therefore people often chose to cut up old, medieval manuscripts. This often involved manuscripts that had lost their value: books that were too Catholic or were written in a language that could no longer be read.

Something very special was found in a number of book bindings in the Alkmaar Regional Archive: 21 fragments of a manuscript from the 11th century, an almost 1,000-year-old Latin psalter with Old English glosses. Thijs Porck, senior university lecturer of medieval English in Leiden, was involved in the find and analyzed the text and provenance of the fragments...

It could well be the long-lost psalter with Old English glosses that belonged to Gunhild, an English princess who fled to the continent after the Norman Conquest of 1066, taking her psalter with Old English glosses with her. Gunhild died in Bruges in the year 1087 and donated her psalter and other treasures to the St. Donaas Church. There, her psalter was last seen in the year 1561 and described as a psalter with English glosses "which one cannot properly understand here."

Since then, every trace of Gunhild's psalter has been lost, but Porck did manage to find out that the books of the Donaas Church were confiscated by Calvinists in the year 1580: With the useful books, they founded a public library, but other, unnecessary books were sold. A psalter with incomprehensible glosses must have belonged to the latter category—is this how the psalter ultimately ended up in the hands of a Leiden bookbinder?

[SunkenCiv]

Credit: Regionaal Archief Alkmaar

[SunkenCiv]

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[Red Badger]

The psalter was peppered with glosses.....................

[SunkenCiv]

• Twin construction worker brothers obsessed with Norse history transform Montana woodlands property into Scandinavian oasis called Valhalla to live as two vikings - where they sit atop hand-crafted thrones and wear tunics
  Martha Williams | Daily Mail | January 24, 2024

[Red Badger]

That looks printed...................

[lefty-lie-spy]

This stupid article is written-by-AI-unreadable. Is there a real version somewhere? The content would be interesting if it were readable.

[FarCenter]

>>Bookbinders used parchment to strengthen their book bindings; that material was expensive and therefore people often chose to cut up old, medieval manuscripts.

Parchment, made from sheep, goat or calf hides, is very expensive and labor intensive to make. The cost of labor of a scribe to write a page of manuscript book is not large compared with the cost of the page of parchment. Hence there is really no need for a printing press while using parchment.

The printing press was enabled by two other developments in the prior 3 centuries. One development was mechanization of processes like the pounding of retted flax to extract linen fibers to spin linen thread and weave linen cloth. The other was mechanization of pounding linen rags to extract fibers to be used to make linen paper. Both windmills and waterwheels were used to power these processes, and the price of linen paper decreased greatly. It became widely used for government and business documents as the price fell.

Thus, it eventually became economic to do printing.

[SunkenCiv]

It really took off after a century of the Black Death and the fall of Constantinople. Instead of relying on the consensus of the village elders (all or most of whom died in the plague) better secular recordkeeping became necessary, which meant a more general literacy, which drove demand for writing materials. The fall of Constantinople cut off access to higher end trade with southern and eastern Asia, led to European circumnavigation of Africa, and the European exploration and diaspora. Good idea to add palimpsest to the keywords, thanks!

[AceMineral]

Yes, after the Black Death the various governments needed to know who was were, and who now owned what. Thus was invented “filling out forms”.

[bgill]

Yep

[lepton]

So a prayer book/psalms with annotations in Old English?

[Red Badger]

Olde English 800 has the power!..................