Over 90% of Medieval Manuscripts Have Been Lost, Study Says

What mechanism(s) do you use to download articles and videos?

Where does 68% come from?

If it was lower how would we know?

Collective memory seems to be defined as "the shared pool of memories, knowledge and information of a social group that is significantly associated with the group's identity", and I don't really know what information is significant to the human identity. That number also seems to really depend on how we define "shared human memory" given that there's been something like 100 billion people on the planet over time and we don't remember the vast majority of their days, conversations, dreams, or poops.

Written material ... which is a very small (though very important) subset of shared human memory.

Dumps are as old as urbanism. The largest collection of papyrii is a dump[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyrhynchus_Papyri

There's a hill in Rome that's entirely made out millions of amphorae.

Gives a fascinating view into Roman mass commerce.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Testaccio

Parchment doesn't last very long in anything other than ideal environments. Deserts are ideal and so we have found things like the dead sea scrolls in Israel, and Egypt has similar treasures (none I can think of off hand, but they have them). Put parchment in a dump in rainy England and it will rot away in a few hundred years.

The manuscripts we have mostly exist because the people of the past (often Christian monks) cared enough about them to make a copy - by hand. (I assume Monks in places like China or India have been making copies in the same way, I just don't know for sure)

They would also rub out the ink and reuse the paper. The term for this is Palimpsest:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest

I came across this practice when reading the Chapter of Fathers in the Mishna:

"Elisha ben Abuyah said: He who learns when a child, to what is he compared? To ink written upon a new writing sheet. And he who learns when an old man, to what is he compared? To ink written on palimpsest. Rabbi Yose ben Judah a man of Kfar Ha-babli said: He who learns from the young, to what is he compared? To one who eats unripe grapes, and drinks wine from his vat; And he who learns from the old, to what is he compared? To one who eats ripe grapes, and drinks old wine. Rabbi [Yehuda] said: don’t look at the container but at that which is in it: there is a new container full of old wine, and an old [container] in which there is not even new [wine]."

Not the OP, but that's an interesting question!

Some googling got me to a quote of "Jehan de Sanlis made this for 6 pence per quire", The Hague, Royal Library, MS 71 A 24, 13th century from https://brewminate.com/making-medieval-manuscripts/ ; I'd guess that illumination and binding these quires (16- or 24-page sheet) doubles the price, so we're at half-pence per page; price summaries from a slightly later time (but different place) like http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng240/medieval_prices.html have similar values (~240 pence/ book) and indicate that a small house costs 500-1000 pence, so a house costs something like 1000-2000 pages worth of books, and it's worth taking into account that medieval manuscripts put less words on a page than modern paperbacks, so the same book would be more pages back then.

From a different perspective, copying the Bible was said to require 15 months of work (Life in a Medieval City, Joseph and Frances Gies) and the price a small house seems to generally be in the range of 1-2 years salary, so a copy of the Bible - which is on the larger range of books - would be comparable to a house.

In any case, an average codex at the time is less than the price of a house but on a similar scale, a collection of a hundred books is comparable to a fancy mansion in the capital.

Not a house today, but house back then. Another way to look at it was that housing was cheaper (for an arguably much inferior product). I've built some wattle and daub structures and a small house could probably be built in a small number of weeks by a couple of labors. But a manuscript might take a year or more for a scribe to fully copy (with illustrations).

Books were written on velum.

Velum is cowhide. Or more specifically, calfskin.

1 calf -> 1 sheet.

How much do 300 head of cattle cost near you?

That's before the scribe costs.

It also accounts to why parchment was so often re-used, in palimpsests, as discussed by others in this thread.

The present-cost equivalent I've heard is from $500k -- $2mm per volume.

As of the 10th -- 15th centuries, a large library (e.g., Papal, University of Paris) might contain 2,000 -- 4,000 volumes.

The combination of cheap papermaking and the Gutenberg press were an impact that's truly difficult to express today, though of course the webserver is in many ways comparable. If there's a difference, it's that there was simply so little printed material in the 15th century that the flood introduced by printing, and the lifting of previous gatekeepers, was utterly profound. The Web produced a flood of media ... into an already media-saturated world, if one that was centred around a much smaller number of individual works, though even that was large relative to an individual. The US has been publishing ~300k books/year since at least the 1950s. An avid reader might tackle a dozen a year, and a book-a-week is a prodigious pace.

I don't directly but a NOVA show I saw dealt specifically with illuminated Manuscripts. The books were made of Vellum, a large one would be equivalent to a heard of animal hides', and took years for to complete by hand. It was a rich man's luxurious novelty. My guess is that it would be equivalent to an art piece by a famous artist now. Even the cheap ones had to use parchment which is still expensive. Paper is cheap now but it was very expensive during Medieval times. It wasn't until we got wood pulp paper and automation that it got very cheap and that didn't come until the mid 1800's.

Why should there be large caches hidden under sands? Has there really been anything like the Dead Sea Scrolls elsewhere? AFAIK those scrolls were there simply because the sect who wrote or collected them lived in those caves, or nearby. Why would anyone cache scrolls under sand (or even anywhere outside)? Isn't that quite unlikely, as a general rule?

Depending on the materials used you could also find older texts hidden in already known books. "erasing" and reusing pages was cheaper than making a new book from scratch. For example the only surviving copy of the Archimedes Palimpsest was found hidden in a prayer book.

Sadly true, and it's not limited to the ancient era. There are tomes from within the past 100-150 years that would shake up most peoples' entire worldview that are readily ignored.

Hell, entire subjects are poo-pooed these days. Dare I say the word 'humanities' around a 'tech' worker?

Lost to indifference, religious or scientific dogma, a lack of curiosity, and even more damaging: a lack of humility.

That doesn't seem true _yet_. I agree it very much is a risk we should be guarding against ... but are there really formats out there for which converters aren't known? It seems like any popular legacy format has a plethora of open-source mechanisms to get at the data (even for DRM) and even hardware might have reversed-engineered specs, or at least old machines being sold on e-bay (though we need to be concerned that won't be the case in a few decades).

Really cool article, thanks for the link!

The estimate is not for all manuscripts, but a specific niche of them - "Instead of focusing on all medieval manuscripts, many of which are religious texts, the study focused on narrative and chivalric fiction".

If we include the larger categories (like the religious texts) then it would be higher, but not that much higher, given the many man-months of work each copy required.