Publications/Sep 14, 2016

Palimpsests: The Art of Medieval Recycling

Palimpsests: The Art of Medieval Recycling lead image

Codex Nitriensis. The British Library (Add MS 17211, f. 49r, detail)

Perhaps the most thrilling find yet is a double-palimpsest from Egypt, a 10th-century manuscript written in Syriac (a Semitic language of the Christian East) on pages that contain a twofold layer of Latin texts. One is a hitherto unidentified grammatical text from the 7th century, written above another 5th-century Latin text preserving fragments of the otherwise lost historical work of the 2nd-century Granius Licinianus, whose writing is known only from these recycled pages.

A nice post on the recycling of parchment in the Middle Ages with a look at some of the British Library’s palimpsests on the Medieval manuscripts blog, September 14, 2016.

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