RIT students discover hidden 15th-century text on medieval manuscripts

Disir

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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.

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.

“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 Zoë LaLena, a second-year imaging science 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.”

That's pretty cool. They built it and then they were able to use it and discover something before graduating.
 
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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.

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.

“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 Zoë LaLena, a second-year imaging science 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.”

That's pretty cool. They built it and then they were able to use it and discover something before graduating.

A different story completely, but similar in nature....

World's oldest complete star map, lost for millennia, found inside medieval manuscript
 

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