Archive of medieval books and manuscripts discovered in Romanian church | Hacker News Reader

Archive of medieval books and manuscripts discovered in Romanian church

medievalists.net

212 pointsquakeguy69 comments

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.

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

And the writing itself might be of interest ;)

Can I ask about your reference to cats and snails?

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-...

Also killer rabbits

Five is right out.

Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time.

For your amusement: https://twitter.com/WeirdMedieval https://twitter.com/WeirdMedieval/status/1653758543244279808

I was with you until the last sentence, and then I got lost

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.

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...

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.

> given how fragile digital storage and peripherals are

Post it on the web. Lots of people will inevitably make copies, ensuring its survival.

In my experience, even for things of some value, this isn't true. I'd perhaps go as far as saying this (understandably) point of view is dangerously misleading.

The two greatest losses I've observed have been the dismemberment of Usenet, and the deprecation of the FTP protocol.

Google's purchase of DejaNews was viewed at the time as a likely win: Google had the budget and the right ethos to preserve the history intact. And perhaps that discouraged others from doing their own preservation? As time has progressed, I've found that Google's archive is missing a lot, and there are precious few other sources. Lots of useful stuff is lost.

More recently, with the major browsers deprecating the FTP protocol, many of the large software archives have closed down due to reduced usage. Many, many things that used to be in the main archives are very difficult or impossible to find now, and lots are likely lost.

As examples, I was recently attempting to find the source code for various Mach (operating system) variants. It was quite difficult to find anything, and many things I know existed from personal experience seem impossible to locate now.

Similarly, some of the early releases of Unix appear to be lost. Various old tapes have been found, but despite being a high-profile item, we've yet to discover copies of key historical releases (see TUHS.org for what does exist).

We need to begin to actively curate and manage our history, or it will disappear.

The key element for both distributed storage and open source codebases appears to be refresh/review frequency.

Which is similar, but slightly different than popularity.

Essentially "With what frequency will someone put eyeballs on and attempt to use this thing"?

Below some critical threshold, integrity is compromised by freak events (hard drive crash, server goes down, host/maintainer decides to retire, etc.) and the material is corrupted/lost before it can be replicated.

E.g. re-hosting that thing that 10,000 people still have copies of, because they noticed it went down yesterday vs. that thing that disappeared a year ago and folks are just noticing

My old BBS system from the 80s still exists on a 200Mb hard drive, but I no longer have any way to read that drive. Who knows what's on my other ancient hard drives :-)

A friend of mine was able to rescue all my software for the PDP-11 from 8" floppies. I put what was mine on github.

A few years ago I tried to power up my old computers. None of them would power up. A couple made a popping sound and smoke came out. Probably all bad caps.

I did find a box of 20 or so zip drives circa 2000, and my old zip drive, which amazingly still worked. I copied everything off onto modern media.

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.

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.

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.

That reminds me, I have an out-of-copyright book by a namesake where I took the photos years ago — before I had a smartphone let alone one with built-in OCR — and still have not gotten around to transferring the text to wiki… source? wikibooks? One of them.

I should do that.

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.

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.

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.

Scantailor Advanced will also help process the images into something resembling a readable scan.

But indeed, as long as you have some images you can dump then onto the Internet Archive for immediate posterity (and hope they don't go under when the lawsuit determines a penalty).

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...

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.

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.

Wonder how many of those surviving churches were themselves erected atop the ashes of a non-Abrahamic site of worship and/or sacrifice

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yes, it is common heritage. We are no different from talibans when destroying religions monuments such as Budda statues that were built by the effort/talent of previous generations.

Those monuments were precious and now are gone.

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.

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"

Perhaps the Bibles are chained to desks today, just as they said!

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).

Priests worry about saving souls. Pastors worry about replacing boilers.

Judging by the name of the parent, I'd say Portugal.

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.

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).

This happened everywhere that the Soviet Union "spread" to. Churches were demolished, desecrated, or burned. Some were re-purposed, but many were destroyed.

church politics were not entirely innocent in this either

Well.. start by reading the aftermath of the Lisbon earthquake.

The persecution took place through about a century to carefully avoid drastic events as you'd later see in France, thus reducing public opposition/outcry. Contrary to France, there was no need for "revolution" because liberals were already in power since the earthquake. More details here: https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extin%C3%A7%C3%A3o_das_ordens_... (need to translate)

My home town is Coimbra. The whole Rua da Sofia (Street of Knowledge) was expropriated and left to abandonment or sold for whatever other purposes without shame on the 18th century. Worse destiny had the church of São Cristovão, presumably built by the father of the first portuguese king: https://www.cm-coimbra.pt/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/coimbra...

For a political movement aimed to bring light into the masses, liberals sure dived the empire into some really dark decades that we'd never recover from afterwards.

Very interesting. I was not aware of this part of Portuguese history. Thank you.

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.

That would be correct from a French-Anglo-centric point of view of the world.

However, liberal Paris was archictecturally and politically powered by the aftermath of the earthquake in Lisbon: https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0ckfxtn/the-earthquake-that-...

That was the turning point which granted liberals/republicans the ruling power over the Portuguese empire and later other empired such as the French. The outcome were religious "reforms" that expropriated, razed and progressively moved to erase catholicism in favour of "enlightment".

In my hometown the churches were left to rot and then "modernized" to other entertainment facilities, owned by private merchants of course. The end result was quite devastating, albeit not as bad as what you'd see happening in France afterwards.

It’s so refreshing to be reminded that history is still lying around us, waiting to be found. Waiting for the right folks.

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!

https://www.britannica.com/technology/cliff-dwelling

oh... buddy....

So is the future ...

Exciting to see so much music notation in one of the shots in the article. Maybe we’ll hear something from someone undiscovered?

I collect old books and I am drooling right now. My oldest are only 1860s.

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.

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

I grew up with a Readers Digest atlas¹ which had reproductions of antique maps on its endpapers. Aside from weird distortions of the shapes of continents, it also had Australia as a peninsula extending from Antarctica. I spent a lot of time studying that old map.

⸻

1. Speaking of old maps, this atlas had such details as Pakistan and Bangladesh as a single country, Vietnam as two countries, and an extensive section on the then-new concept of plate-tectonics including maps showing prehistoric configurations of the continents.

that is so cool!! what a find

Do you do anything special to preserve them?

Does your local weather cooperate or hinder your collection ?

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.

Nope, no different from safely keeping any other books, but I might if I had even older ones depending on their condition.

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.

Coincidentally on other news today people in Emilia Romana are rushing to salvage old books stored in the basements of flooded churches.

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.

It is a pity that Aristotle's second book of "Poetics" doesn't seem to be among the books found there.

The last known copy of that burned with a Benedictine monastary in the 14th century

Nice reference, "The Name of The Rose" is my favourite book. A masterpiece.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com