{"id":116205,"date":"2020-11-20T00:09:25","date_gmt":"2020-11-19T21:09:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/students-discover-hidden-15th-century-text-on-medieval-manuscripts\/"},"modified":"2020-11-20T00:09:25","modified_gmt":"2020-11-19T21:09:25","slug":"students-discover-hidden-15th-century-text-on-medieval-manuscripts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/students-discover-hidden-15th-century-text-on-medieval-manuscripts\/","title":{"rendered":"#Students discover hidden 15th-century text on medieval manuscripts"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Students discover hidden 15th-century text on medieval manuscript<\/a>s<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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\n By using ultraviolet-fluorescence imaging, RIT students revealed that a 15th-century manuscript leaf held in RIT\u2019s Cary Graphic Arts Collection was actually a palimpsest, a manuscript on parchment with multiple layers of writing. The image on the left shows the document as it appears in visible light, while the image on the right was produced by the student-built imaging system. Credit: Rochester Institute of Technology<\/a>
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Rochester Institute of Technology students discovered lost text on 15th-century manuscript leaves using an imaging system they developed as freshmen. By using ultraviolet-fluorescence imaging, the students revealed that a manuscript leaf held in RIT’s Cary Graphic Arts Collection was actually a palimpsest, a manuscript on parchment with multiple layers of writing.<\/p>\n


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At the time the manuscript was written, making parchment was expensive, so leaves were regularly scraped or erased and re-used. While the erased text is invisible to the naked eye, the chemical signature of the initial writing can sometimes be detected using other areas of the light spectrum.<\/p>\n

“Using our system, we borrowed several parchments from the Cary Collection here at RIT and when we put one of them under the UV light, it showed this amazing dark French cursive underneath,” said Zo\u00eb LaLena, a second-year imaging science<\/a> student from Fairport, N.Y., who worked on the project. “This was amazing because this document has been in the Cary Collection for about a decade now and no one noticed. And because it’s also from the Ege Collection, in which there’s 30 other known pages from this book, it’s really fascinating that the 29 other pages we know the location of have the potential to also be palimpsests.”<\/p>\n

The imaging system was originally built by 19 students enrolled in the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science’s Innovative Freshman Experience, a yearlong, project-based course that has the imaging science, motion picture science, and photographic sciences programs combine their talents to solve a problem.<\/p>\n

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\n A multidisciplinary team of students, Including Lisa Enochs, left, created the imaging system for their Innovative Freshman Experience class. The team started the project last fall, before RIT switched to remote instruction in March 2020. Credit: Gabrielle Plucknette-DeVito
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When RIT switched to remote instruction in March due to the coronavirus outbreak, the students were unable to finish building it, but thanks to a donation from Jeffrey Harris ’75 (photographic science and instrumentation) and Joyce Pratt, three students received funding to continue to work on the project over the summer. Those three students\u2014LaLena; Lisa Enochs, a second-year student double majoring in motion picture science and imaging science from Mississauga, Ontario; and Malcom Zale, a second-year motion picture science student from Milford, Mass.\u2014finished assembling the system in the fall when classes resumed and began analyzing documents from the Cary Collection.<\/p>\n

Steven Galbraith, curator of the Cary Graphic Arts Collection, said he was excited they discovered the manuscript leaf was a palimpsest because similar leaves have been studied extensively by scholars across the country, but never tested with UV light or fully imaged.<\/p>\n

Collector, educator, and historian Otto Ege made leaf collections out of medieval manuscripts that were damaged or incomplete and sold them or distributed them to libraries and special collections across North America, including to the Cary Collection. Galbraith said he’s excited because it means that many other cultural and academic institutions with Ege Collection leaves now may have palimpsests in their collection to study.<\/p>\n


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