The reason for the scribes’ ink choice may have to do with what particular ink-making materials were available near their workshop.” “This process also helped us to establish, since the text appeared dark under infra-red light, that the two scribes had in fact used a carbon-based ink - made from soot and called ‘lampblack’ - rather than the more common ‘iron-gall ink’, made from gallnuts, which would appear light under infra-red illumination.
We captured images of damaged sections and, through digital processing, could read some parts of the text more clearly. “Working with Professor Andy Beeby of Durham University’s Department of Chemistry was also a game changer for our project thanks to the mobile Raman spectrometer developed by him and his team, Team Pigment, especially for manuscript study. “Most manuscripts of the text known to have been in England in the Middle Ages were composed after 1275, so this is an especially early example, both of Suite Vulgate manuscripts in general anywhere, but especially of ones known to have found their way to England from France in the Middle Ages.
Medieval dragon manuscript full#
Their collaborative research and findings, which include a full transcription and translation into English of the text, have been brought together in a new book called The Bristol Merlin : Revealing the Secrets of a Medieval Fragment, recently published by ARC Humanities Press with full-page colour images of the fragments captured by award-winning Bristol-based photographer, Don Hooper. Laura Chuhan Campbell, a specialist in the Old French Merlin stories from Durham University, set out to examine and analyse the fragments in detail to discover more about them. Benjamin Pohl from the University’s Department of History and Dr.
The find attracted significant media attention, with the Bristol Merlin, as it quickly became known, making headlines across the world.Īfter the discovery Professor Leah Tether, President of the International Arthurian Society (British Branch) from Bristol’s Department of English, her husband, medieval historian and manuscript specialist Dr. Parts of this Cycle may have been used by Sir Thomas Malory (1415-1471) as a source for his Le Morte Darthur (first printed in 1485 by William Caxton) which is itself the main source text for many modern retellings of the Arthurian legend in English. The fragments contain a passage from the Old French sequence of texts known as the Vulgate Cycle or Lancelot-Grail Cycle, which dates to the early 13 th century.
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