Medieval manuscripts are bound to seals – History

A new study of 12th and 13th century manuscripts in the Monastery Library of Clairvaux, France, found that 43 of them were bound to seal systems imported from the North Atlantic, rather than from animals sourced from locally sourced, such as deer or wild boars, as previously believed.

The Cistercian Monastery of Clairvaux Abbey has a series of manuscripts that have been amazing since the Middle Ages. By the early 1500s it had 1,000 volumes in the library, most of which had been copied in Clairvaux’s own Scriptorium, and today there are 1,450 medieval books in the series. About 50% of them are in their original bindings, which is extremely rare for medieval manuscripts because they often rebound. Among the 168 surviving original bindings from the 12th to the 14th century, they remain intact, and since most of them were produced inside the monastery of Clairvaux, they are a unique source of information on how books were made in the Middle Ages.

The Romanesque manuscript copied and bound in Clairvaux Scriptorium has a unique feature: the secondary cover is called a lining made of leather, retaining animal hair. The historical catalog describes these skins made of deer or wild boar, but their hair follicles distribution on the skin does not match the deer or wild boar.

To determine which animals’ skins are actually used to create petticoats, the researchers analyzed 29 bindings of Clairvaux and his daughter House Clairmarais by mass spectrometry (Ezooms) (Ezooms) and ancient DNA (ADNA). Ezooms analysis classifies the seven bindings as those made of sealing leather, although it can only narrow the seal in one case (this is a seal of a beard). ADNA analysis was able to further develop, identifying four bindings as port seal leather, and the other was the harp seal of the North-West Atlantic Ocean, namely Scandinavia, Scotland, Scotland and Iceland or Greenland.

In this surprising revelation, researchers search for manuscripts with furry layers in other collections. They analyzed 13 other bindings from the French, British and Belgian monasteries and found that they were also seals. The seal system is not mentioned in the records of the Clairvaux Monastery, and there is no mention of their acquisition or use, but there is a record from the late 13th century that the document tithe was paid to the church with seal skin. Clairvaux and his daughter Abbeys are also located near local trade routes related to the wider network of Hanseatic League and Nordic Traders, so they can use skins with mixed skins even if they are not tithes. They didn’t even know they were seal skins, because seals didn’t see much in medieval art and heraldry.

With the general assumption that books are made from locally sourced materials, it appears that Cistercians are deeply embedded in the global trade network, obtaining skins through a wide range of trade exchanges. This observation goes beyond the bounds and includes most materials used for covers and text blocks of parchment. While librarians, paleographers and editors strive to identify the origin and origin of these skins through traditional literary sources only, the disciplines of biology and biological disease provide valuable insights. The comprehensive approach used in this study not only enriches our understanding of the production of Sitho manuscripts, but also emphasizes wider economic and cultural exchanges during the medieval period.

The study has been published in the journal Royal Society Open Science You can read it here.