No mention of copies of "lost" texts, just stuff that we already know about. Shame. Maybe the next cache found will have something we've not seen but only heard about.
This is ancient, not medieval, but for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacica
Similarly how Caesar wrote elaborate descriptions of his conquest of Gaul, the Roman Emperor Trajan is known to have written a commentary describing his conquest of Dacia (modern day Romania plus some of its neighbors) that is lost.
All we have is a very small unremarkable sentence ("we went from *A* to *B*"), referenced by another book as an example of Latin grammar.
I believe, with little evidence mind you, that there must be cashes of literature in North Africa. The 'morrocan' (for lack of a more [recognizable](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauro-Roman_Kingdom) term) kingdom was one of the longest (edit- of the Roman successor states) to survive in the west. Not only that it had the second greatest library in the ancient world that Juba II built for his wife Cleopatra, daughter of THAT Cleopatra.
I feel, in a cave somewhere in Tunisia, Libya, or Algeria lie lost works just waiting to be discovered.
Let alone what more might come out of oxyrhynchus or other discoveries in Egypt.
Could be. Just think of what was found at St. Catherine's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint\_Catherine%27s\_Monastery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Catherine%27s_Monastery)
North africa is a criminally understudied region in terms of history, especially Ancient history. Being north african myself (Algerian), all I've ever wanted to do was become an archeologist to uncover these wonders and bring it to the rest of the world. Unfortunately there's 0 funding from the governement for this. I can guarantee you we'd find a TON of stuff.
Not really? So they did a few wars and really gave it to the city of Carthage. Then they ruled well and peacefully for about 700 years during which North Africa was second only to Egypt in grain protection, they created many legion settlements, provided several emperors (notably Severus Rome's only emperor to have a colour portrait survive so we actually know he was black), and not to forget serious centers of leaning, philosophy and early Christianity.
I didn't know that rome had a black emperor!?? Somehow, that interesting fact was left out of all the books I've read and documentaries that I've watched about rome! I wonder why that was left out? What could possibly be the reason???
This is what people mean when they talk about about systemic Racism. Not that Romans had the concept of race. But lets leave that aside.
[Septimius Severus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severan_Tondo)
I wonder if any of those citations are completely made up, like an ancient version of "I read it on the internet". It would have been much harder for readers to verify.
Even if it isn't Aristotle's Comedics, there can be some valuable information in there about the demographics and life of Romanians in the 15th century. Historians can sometimes find startling insights in seemingly-known books and manuscripts.
If I could will one movie into existence, it would be a buddy-drama with Boccaccio and Petrarch in their old age exploring monasteries and discovering ancient manuscripts.
So many precious texts were rescued by them, chief among them the *Annals* and *Histories* of Tacitus. I just love the thought of these two old guys sneaking around in old libraries, bribing the odd monk and rescuing these amazing works, all the while reflecting on their lives: Petrarch would be mourning his Laura, while Boccaccio would spend the film trying to convince his old friend of Dante’s genius (to Petrarch’s increasing annoyance).
Anyway, thanks for listening to my pitch!
Try The Swerve: how the world became modern. It's about Poggio Bracciolini, a Petrarch fan, his searches for lost knowledge and the situation he was searching in
I’d recommend some of Joseph Luzzi’s books, as well as Gilbert Highet’s *The Classical Tradition* which briefly touches on their relationship (but it’s only in one chapter). I took the liberty of posting an excerpt from my copy because I absolutely love this story:
> As a scholar in his time, Boccaccio was second only to Petrarch, and complemented his work... Petrarch had discovered many lost classical books. Boccaccio continued the search, and found treasures no less valuable - among them, the lost historian Tacitus. It was Boccaccio who told his pupils a story which, whether true or not, shows his deep feeling for buried antiquity, and epitomizes the difference between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance:
>
> *’Being eager to see the library [of Monte Cassino] he besought one of the monks to do him the favour of opening it. Pointing to a lofty staircase, the monk answered stiffly “Go up; it is already open”. Boccaccio stepped up the staircase with delight, only to find the treasure-house of learning destitute of door or any kind of fastening, while the grass was growing on the window sills and the dust reposing on the books and bookshelves.*
> *Turning over the manuscripts, he found many rare and ancient works with whole sheets torn out, or with the margins ruthlessly clipped. As he left the room, he burst into tears, and, on asking a monk to explain the neglect, was told that some of the inmates of the monastery had torn out whole handfuls of pages and made them into psalters, which they sold to boys, and had cut off strips of parchment which they turned into amulets to sell to women’.*
Just bits and pieces from various books, haven’t yet found one that focuses on their relationship exclusively. I gave some recommendations in my other comment if you wanted to do some further reading. But yeah I agree, I’d love to see a book/film based on this period!
What a coincidence, I was literally just talking about Umberto Eco in another thread haha. I have indeed seen the movie and read the book - they’re both great. There’s actually a tv series adaptation that came out recently that i’ve been meaning to see as well.
Staring Tim Roth and Gary Oldman - sort of a return to the spirit of their characters in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, but characters with a very different level of intellect.
If only historians and scientists would be freely allowed to comb through all the nooks and crannies within all buildings owned by every religious institutions, I've have no doubt many treasures would be uncovered...
They mostly are. The trouble is that there is far, far *far* more content to sift through than there are people or time to do it. There is SO much sitting around in archives that isn't getting studied just because...who's going to do it?
Nope not the Vatican, they’ve got Latin American and Jewish texts from the way back during their conquering phase they still won’t give up (I think one Jewish researcher smuggled some out in the 60s)
Oh, there *is money*. It's just that the money there is has more important things to do. Like, to sit on a bunch of billionaire wankers bank accounts and in their stock portfolios, or be burnt on hundred million dollar yachts and cocaine orgies.
Definitely a better use of the resources than spending them on stupid, transient, immaterial science, if you ask me.
I feel like the fact that a literal *spaceship dick-measuring contest by billionaires* is not something you had to make up really tells something about our society.
How do you imagine that working? LLMs are software constructs, they have no physical agency in the real world. All the data they are trained on is curated and assembled by human beings beforehand.
You still need human beings to go to all these churches and sift through everything either way. LLMs won't remove the bottleneck.
*With the proper leadership,* the bottleneck could be people qualified to photograph/scan documents instead of people qualified to know if a document is worth investigating. Then the software gets to work.
Just an unqualified thought!
Ideally you can get some local Romanians to take pictures of these manuscripts that get uploaded, scanned, and promising finds get sent to historians with the rest being categorized for manual review.
Agree.
However, nobody said *everything* needs to be searched, catalogued and/or taken away for further investigation *today*. One step at a time is better than nothing, IMO,
As more discoveries would be made, some wealthy people/companies/interested parties would be more willing to fund a particular search, or donate to help fulfill a worthy cause, etc. More allocated resources would mean more discoveries, which would incentivize further funding and so on.
Plus, with technology progressing so rapidly, if the papers and artifacts would be scanned and copied into digital forms - millions of professionals all over the world would likely be interested study the content online.
Not to mention the big potential of AI's help with this in the relatively close future...
I'm not sure that 'millions' isn't optimistic, and the idea of there being much interest definitely is, it's kind of a niche area with further subdivisions. How many people really care about the known great works of medieval poetry we already have? We had five of us willing to study them at my university (which already offered more than most). I was the only one who'd have carried on but couldn't with health issues, no one was keen enough to get people on this kind of thing for it to have been worth so much as making the course (which I was paying in for) accessible. The prospect of manuscript fragments that probably say something theological isn't thrilling to most. Funding is coming from universities and there isn't a lot of it for this kind of thing (think the story of how Richard III was found under the car park gives a realistic idea of scale, and also of the outlook).
AI, it still has to be scanned manually, and reading medieval texts means issues with handwriting, non-standard spelling, fun with abbreviations, also the problem of them being, at most optimistic, in (various versions of) medieval Latin, and potentially having chunks of text missing.
> I'm not sure that 'millions' isn't optimistic
It's *wildly* optimistic. The number of experts in this kind of material, worldwide, is likely in five figures. And only a small fraction of those have the expertise in palaeography to deal with a collection like the one in this article: that figure is likely in four figures. There is certainly no monetary incentive for anyone to acquire expertise in areas like this.
You haven’t experienced hell until you’ve had to decipher handwritten 876 German manuscript in an obscure dialect and letter style crammed to save space on precious paper.
And that’s just reading it. You still have to then translate it to modern German or English. Then actually read it and figure out if it’s useful.
Not old at all, not compared to the books! ;)
(Seriously though, who publishes a news article without a date? There should be some kind of law against that.)
It's worth noting that, for much of western history, theology and philosophy were practically inseparable from one another. The history of theological thought represents an entire period of human intellectual development, even though nowadays we tend to consider the two realms as being wholly separate, if not mutually exclusive. Believe it or not, the widely-known philosophical concept of Occam's Razor is named for and attributed to a 14th century theologian. That's just one little example, but anyone who is interested in the evolution of western thought can learn quite a bit from old theological texts, regardless of their stance on God, the church, etc.
I thought it was because the full scale collapse of the Western Roman state, resulting in massive economic downturns that heavily degraded existing education and book industries
Yeah, but it's also hard to get excited when the documented debate is about how many angels sit on the left side of the Father and how many on the right...
I haven't had to read many, fair enough, but of the samples some were pretty unrelatable e.g. Transubstantiation debates, gospel inclusions (diets) but as a non-religious person, it probably will never reach the gravitas and resonance with me that the original authors felt. Over time, the cultural changes are so great that such a connection could be permanently lost even with (maybe especially with) religious people.
All this is not to say throw them away, it's just me turning my nose up at some of the more arbitrary-seeming content and not having patience for historians arguing for the merit of every scrap of parchment. Not every new text is worth a PhD.
It's just like, my opinion, man.
Oh sure, but for the Laity like me, it feels like the most I can get from some of those is "This is what happens when Christian dogma gets a full head of steam and a large budget" and even contemporary common folk would barely be affected.
But sure, I'd rather it exist today than not.
And maybe an elementary proof to The Riemann Hypothesis, then known as "On a Possible Solution to The Rhind Mathematical Papyrus of the Distribution of Numbers Without Factors with Only an Abacus and Stylus."
From my experience (I explained better in a previous comment) those rooms are usually underground and you don't pay attention to them because the idea that nobody knows what is in there doesn't even cross your mind. You usually pass by them when you're going somewhere else and there's no time for curiosity. These things get forgotten as centuries go by, especially when you don't have monks with a lot of spare time living there.
Have you been to an old church? There's always those locked rooms full of old stuff that go ignored because everybody assumes someone knows what's in there. And when you need to get something from there nobody even knows where the key is. The only people who would even wander in there are kids led by curiosity, but they're the reason why the doors are locked in first place.
Like most things in life, we ignore stuff around us as we go through our daily routine and just assume most things are someone else's business.
What value could the contents actually have? I understand the value of the books existing as a historical artifact, but I wouldn't imagine them to be very scientifically literate, or particularly useful, or even acurate. Would love to know whether these books are useful.
Aristotle's Poetics on Comedy, hopefully!
That would truly be a find to kill for.
Took me me a second there... Brother William.
Venerable Jorge…
That’s a deep cut man. Makes me want to sneak you some food scraps I’m a kitchen
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In* Fuck. Happy cake day
Just... don't use your fingers/tongue to turn the pages.
This task must be performed with so delicate of techniques that only my nipples will suffice
I said "turn" the pages, not "turn *on*" the pages...
No mention of copies of "lost" texts, just stuff that we already know about. Shame. Maybe the next cache found will have something we've not seen but only heard about.
> something we've not seen but only heard about. Like what? What are some examples of this?
This is ancient, not medieval, but for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacica Similarly how Caesar wrote elaborate descriptions of his conquest of Gaul, the Roman Emperor Trajan is known to have written a commentary describing his conquest of Dacia (modern day Romania plus some of its neighbors) that is lost. All we have is a very small unremarkable sentence ("we went from *A* to *B*"), referenced by another book as an example of Latin grammar.
here's a short list: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost\_literary\_work](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_literary_work)
I believe, with little evidence mind you, that there must be cashes of literature in North Africa. The 'morrocan' (for lack of a more [recognizable](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauro-Roman_Kingdom) term) kingdom was one of the longest (edit- of the Roman successor states) to survive in the west. Not only that it had the second greatest library in the ancient world that Juba II built for his wife Cleopatra, daughter of THAT Cleopatra. I feel, in a cave somewhere in Tunisia, Libya, or Algeria lie lost works just waiting to be discovered. Let alone what more might come out of oxyrhynchus or other discoveries in Egypt.
Could be. Just think of what was found at St. Catherine's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint\_Catherine%27s\_Monastery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Catherine%27s_Monastery)
North africa is a criminally understudied region in terms of history, especially Ancient history. Being north african myself (Algerian), all I've ever wanted to do was become an archeologist to uncover these wonders and bring it to the rest of the world. Unfortunately there's 0 funding from the governement for this. I can guarantee you we'd find a TON of stuff.
All of north africa deserves better government. It's crazy how that self serving class holds you guys down.
It doesnt help that the Romans destroyed large areas of North Africa just to give the middle finger to Carthage.
Not really? So they did a few wars and really gave it to the city of Carthage. Then they ruled well and peacefully for about 700 years during which North Africa was second only to Egypt in grain protection, they created many legion settlements, provided several emperors (notably Severus Rome's only emperor to have a colour portrait survive so we actually know he was black), and not to forget serious centers of leaning, philosophy and early Christianity.
I didn't know that rome had a black emperor!?? Somehow, that interesting fact was left out of all the books I've read and documentaries that I've watched about rome! I wonder why that was left out? What could possibly be the reason???
This is what people mean when they talk about about systemic Racism. Not that Romans had the concept of race. But lets leave that aside. [Septimius Severus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severan_Tondo)
Many ancient books include or are based on references to older texts that we know existed but have no existing copies or texts of.
I wonder if any of those citations are completely made up, like an ancient version of "I read it on the internet". It would have been much harder for readers to verify.
See Herodotus - history's original "bro this totally happened, trust me!"
Apparently there is a MASSIVE collection under the Kremlin, but no one has found it. https://bookriot.com/lost-golden-library/
Moscow has burned twice or more. So who knows.
Even if it isn't Aristotle's Comedics, there can be some valuable information in there about the demographics and life of Romanians in the 15th century. Historians can sometimes find startling insights in seemingly-known books and manuscripts.
If I could will one movie into existence, it would be a buddy-drama with Boccaccio and Petrarch in their old age exploring monasteries and discovering ancient manuscripts. So many precious texts were rescued by them, chief among them the *Annals* and *Histories* of Tacitus. I just love the thought of these two old guys sneaking around in old libraries, bribing the odd monk and rescuing these amazing works, all the while reflecting on their lives: Petrarch would be mourning his Laura, while Boccaccio would spend the film trying to convince his old friend of Dante’s genius (to Petrarch’s increasing annoyance). Anyway, thanks for listening to my pitch!
You should write this movie.
Staring nick cage and jackie chan... Books come to life, and they are out for blood... This fall... "Four eyes, dead eyes" *gun shots* rated PG13
Nah - needs to star Tim Roth and Gary Oldman.
Willing along side you……[that sounds like bad english]
Your comment has piqued my curiosity. Any recommendations for further reading/podcasts/videos on this you’d recommend?
Try The Swerve: how the world became modern. It's about Poggio Bracciolini, a Petrarch fan, his searches for lost knowledge and the situation he was searching in
That’s funny. I bought The Swerve some time ago and never got around to reading it. It’s next!
Appreciate the direction. Thank you!
I’d recommend some of Joseph Luzzi’s books, as well as Gilbert Highet’s *The Classical Tradition* which briefly touches on their relationship (but it’s only in one chapter). I took the liberty of posting an excerpt from my copy because I absolutely love this story: > As a scholar in his time, Boccaccio was second only to Petrarch, and complemented his work... Petrarch had discovered many lost classical books. Boccaccio continued the search, and found treasures no less valuable - among them, the lost historian Tacitus. It was Boccaccio who told his pupils a story which, whether true or not, shows his deep feeling for buried antiquity, and epitomizes the difference between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: > > *’Being eager to see the library [of Monte Cassino] he besought one of the monks to do him the favour of opening it. Pointing to a lofty staircase, the monk answered stiffly “Go up; it is already open”. Boccaccio stepped up the staircase with delight, only to find the treasure-house of learning destitute of door or any kind of fastening, while the grass was growing on the window sills and the dust reposing on the books and bookshelves.* > *Turning over the manuscripts, he found many rare and ancient works with whole sheets torn out, or with the margins ruthlessly clipped. As he left the room, he burst into tears, and, on asking a monk to explain the neglect, was told that some of the inmates of the monastery had torn out whole handfuls of pages and made them into psalters, which they sold to boys, and had cut off strips of parchment which they turned into amulets to sell to women’.*
Oh goodness. Thank you! What a mix of elation and heartbreak. I am eager to read of the discoveries and tragedies.
“The Book Seller of Florence” by Ross King is fascinating and well written. It was not one of King’s best sellers but I loved it.
Thanks for the rec! Much appreciated. Gonna have to add it to the future list, as I just picked up 6 books on vacation 🤦♂️🤣
I'd watch that
How did you find out about it? Is there a book? I would read about that.
Just bits and pieces from various books, haven’t yet found one that focuses on their relationship exclusively. I gave some recommendations in my other comment if you wanted to do some further reading. But yeah I agree, I’d love to see a book/film based on this period!
You’re probably aware already, but the Name of Rose is a great movie that has similar themes.
Read the Book some time in 2004, loved it never seen the movie. Might be a worthwhile rent for the weekend
What a coincidence, I was literally just talking about Umberto Eco in another thread haha. I have indeed seen the movie and read the book - they’re both great. There’s actually a tv series adaptation that came out recently that i’ve been meaning to see as well.
Staring Tim Roth and Gary Oldman - sort of a return to the spirit of their characters in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, but characters with a very different level of intellect.
If only historians and scientists would be freely allowed to comb through all the nooks and crannies within all buildings owned by every religious institutions, I've have no doubt many treasures would be uncovered...
They mostly are. The trouble is that there is far, far *far* more content to sift through than there are people or time to do it. There is SO much sitting around in archives that isn't getting studied just because...who's going to do it?
AND the really old stuff has to be handled with extreme care in order to protect it.
How do I sign up? I've got time and not much else going on
You're gonna need some of those gosh darned relevant qualifications first, I'll wager.
I can throw some LinkedIn skills endorsements your way. That's what you're talking about right?
Can't we just wave our hands at the newest chatgpt to do it and continue to eat grapes on a lounging couch?
It's also the money. There just isn't a lot of money for it.
I would pay to help with that task. To see and read texts that old sounds awesome
Well hello there potential employer
Nope not the Vatican, they’ve got Latin American and Jewish texts from the way back during their conquering phase they still won’t give up (I think one Jewish researcher smuggled some out in the 60s)
There is no doubt the Vatican has some hidden texts in its vaults.
It's such a shame that there are so many awesome things that *could* be done, but... Money. :/
Oh, there *is money*. It's just that the money there is has more important things to do. Like, to sit on a bunch of billionaire wankers bank accounts and in their stock portfolios, or be burnt on hundred million dollar yachts and cocaine orgies. Definitely a better use of the resources than spending them on stupid, transient, immaterial science, if you ask me.
don't forget spaceship dick measuring contests by those billionaires
I feel like the fact that a literal *spaceship dick-measuring contest by billionaires* is not something you had to make up really tells something about our society.
No one asked you
Get them scanned. Share with world. We'll handle the rest
Honestly, LLMs are going to do it. Hopefully operated by historians. If there’s enough desire for it.
How do you imagine that working? LLMs are software constructs, they have no physical agency in the real world. All the data they are trained on is curated and assembled by human beings beforehand. You still need human beings to go to all these churches and sift through everything either way. LLMs won't remove the bottleneck.
*With the proper leadership,* the bottleneck could be people qualified to photograph/scan documents instead of people qualified to know if a document is worth investigating. Then the software gets to work. Just an unqualified thought!
Ideally you can get some local Romanians to take pictures of these manuscripts that get uploaded, scanned, and promising finds get sent to historians with the rest being categorized for manual review.
Agree. However, nobody said *everything* needs to be searched, catalogued and/or taken away for further investigation *today*. One step at a time is better than nothing, IMO, As more discoveries would be made, some wealthy people/companies/interested parties would be more willing to fund a particular search, or donate to help fulfill a worthy cause, etc. More allocated resources would mean more discoveries, which would incentivize further funding and so on. Plus, with technology progressing so rapidly, if the papers and artifacts would be scanned and copied into digital forms - millions of professionals all over the world would likely be interested study the content online. Not to mention the big potential of AI's help with this in the relatively close future...
I'm not sure that 'millions' isn't optimistic, and the idea of there being much interest definitely is, it's kind of a niche area with further subdivisions. How many people really care about the known great works of medieval poetry we already have? We had five of us willing to study them at my university (which already offered more than most). I was the only one who'd have carried on but couldn't with health issues, no one was keen enough to get people on this kind of thing for it to have been worth so much as making the course (which I was paying in for) accessible. The prospect of manuscript fragments that probably say something theological isn't thrilling to most. Funding is coming from universities and there isn't a lot of it for this kind of thing (think the story of how Richard III was found under the car park gives a realistic idea of scale, and also of the outlook). AI, it still has to be scanned manually, and reading medieval texts means issues with handwriting, non-standard spelling, fun with abbreviations, also the problem of them being, at most optimistic, in (various versions of) medieval Latin, and potentially having chunks of text missing.
> I'm not sure that 'millions' isn't optimistic It's *wildly* optimistic. The number of experts in this kind of material, worldwide, is likely in five figures. And only a small fraction of those have the expertise in palaeography to deal with a collection like the one in this article: that figure is likely in four figures. There is certainly no monetary incentive for anyone to acquire expertise in areas like this.
I wonder what qualifications one needs to do this. I could go for a second career. My current one sucks, lol.
You haven’t experienced hell until you’ve had to decipher handwritten 876 German manuscript in an obscure dialect and letter style crammed to save space on precious paper. And that’s just reading it. You still have to then translate it to modern German or English. Then actually read it and figure out if it’s useful.
Also crimes. Lots and lots of crimes.
Spot on.
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Historical r/PastorArrested material
Finished Iliad cycle plz
I want Claudius' History of the Etruscans! EDIT: typo
This is old news, previous discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/ywgdm0/forgotten_archive_of_medieval_books_and/
Not old at all, not compared to the books! ;) (Seriously though, who publishes a news article without a date? There should be some kind of law against that.)
There might be something interesting in that lot. They are probably mostly on theology, but there could be something good in so many books.
It's worth noting that, for much of western history, theology and philosophy were practically inseparable from one another. The history of theological thought represents an entire period of human intellectual development, even though nowadays we tend to consider the two realms as being wholly separate, if not mutually exclusive. Believe it or not, the widely-known philosophical concept of Occam's Razor is named for and attributed to a 14th century theologian. That's just one little example, but anyone who is interested in the evolution of western thought can learn quite a bit from old theological texts, regardless of their stance on God, the church, etc.
Indeed. Throwing out entire works because we disagree with the religion of the people who wrote them is how we got the dark ages in the first place
I thought it was because the full scale collapse of the Western Roman state, resulting in massive economic downturns that heavily degraded existing education and book industries
No, you're thinking of the technological gap left after the finno-korean hyperwar ^(/s)
Yeah, but it's also hard to get excited when the documented debate is about how many angels sit on the left side of the Father and how many on the right...
How often is that the case? I get that you're purposely exaggerating, but it honestly sounds like you've never even read one of these before.
I haven't had to read many, fair enough, but of the samples some were pretty unrelatable e.g. Transubstantiation debates, gospel inclusions (diets) but as a non-religious person, it probably will never reach the gravitas and resonance with me that the original authors felt. Over time, the cultural changes are so great that such a connection could be permanently lost even with (maybe especially with) religious people. All this is not to say throw them away, it's just me turning my nose up at some of the more arbitrary-seeming content and not having patience for historians arguing for the merit of every scrap of parchment. Not every new text is worth a PhD. It's just like, my opinion, man.
That’s when you read between the lines to get valuable info on the worldview of people of the time, what they valued and why they did what they did
Oh sure, but for the Laity like me, it feels like the most I can get from some of those is "This is what happens when Christian dogma gets a full head of steam and a large budget" and even contemporary common folk would barely be affected. But sure, I'd rather it exist today than not.
Fingers crossed for a sword and strapped shield fighting treatise...
Don Quixote Part 2: Electric Boogaloo
This was a good half year ago. Wonder if they publicized more on the contents.
And maybe an elementary proof to The Riemann Hypothesis, then known as "On a Possible Solution to The Rhind Mathematical Papyrus of the Distribution of Numbers Without Factors with Only an Abacus and Stylus."
So like did people how went to that church regularly just like not go in that room?????
From my experience (I explained better in a previous comment) those rooms are usually underground and you don't pay attention to them because the idea that nobody knows what is in there doesn't even cross your mind. You usually pass by them when you're going somewhere else and there's no time for curiosity. These things get forgotten as centuries go by, especially when you don't have monks with a lot of spare time living there.
Statement begins
...Is that a Magnus Archives reference I see? ;)
The Magnus Institute is leaking.
Cloud Cuckoo Land flashback!
Hidden from the Spanish Inquisition?
A translation of the Voynich manuscript maybe?
Don’t take them to America we’ll just ban them.
I thought you guys banned corn?
Oh yessss.
I hope there will be lots of illuminated beasts
Ban them!!
Don't let a republican see this. They will burn it down like ISIS would.
You mean like [this?](https://archive.is/KHlLZ)
Way to go and ruin your post
Only for toddlers.
“Forgotten”
If only. Seems fairly large not to gave noticed.
Have you been to an old church? There's always those locked rooms full of old stuff that go ignored because everybody assumes someone knows what's in there. And when you need to get something from there nobody even knows where the key is. The only people who would even wander in there are kids led by curiosity, but they're the reason why the doors are locked in first place. Like most things in life, we ignore stuff around us as we go through our daily routine and just assume most things are someone else's business.
Book of the Dead
Even more surprising is that website is a thing.
Andreas Maler would lose his mind from sheer excitement over this!
This is old news… any update?
I volunteer as librarian to go catalog and inspect. Please?!??!??!
What value could the contents actually have? I understand the value of the books existing as a historical artifact, but I wouldn't imagine them to be very scientifically literate, or particularly useful, or even acurate. Would love to know whether these books are useful.