Torn, folded, stitched and bound into a book of property records from the 1500s, rare tales of Merlin shapeshifting into King Arthur’s court and Sir Gawain gaining power from the sun had gone unnoticed for centuries, stacked among the records of an English manor and then among the millions of volumes of a university library.
At least until an archivist took another look, setting off a yearslong project to identify and then reassemble the medieval manuscript, which someone in Tudor England had taken apart and used to help hold together a ledger.
The manuscript turned out to be a priceless find: extremely rare stories of Arthurian romance, copied by a scribe between 1275 and 1315, and part of the “Suite Vulgate du Merlin,” an Old French sequel to the start of the Arthur legend. Cambridge University researchers announced their findings this week and published a digitized version of the manuscript online.
There are fewer than 40 copies of the Suite Vulgate sequel known to exist, and no two are exactly the same.
“Each manuscript copy of a medieval text, handwritten by a scribe, is going to be changed little by little,” said Irène Fabry-Tehranchi, the French specialist at the university library. “As the copies come along, each scribe imposes his own taste.”
The manuscript tells two stories.
The first is about Sir Gawain, nephew of King Arthur, whose rivals include both rebellious barons at home and pagan Saxons invading from abroad. Among the intransigent nobles is Gawain’s own father, and Gawain sides with Arthur to defeat him. Then it’s on to the Saxons.
Wielding Excalibur, the sword of myth, Gawain grows more powerful as the sun rises, reaching peak strength at midday. His victory for Arthur’s side is no less satisfying for being predictable.
In the second episode, Arthur and his queen, Guinevere, are presiding over a feast when it is interrupted by a mysterious visitor, a blind harpist, guided into court by a white dog. Charmed by his music, Arthur agrees to the strange man’s even stranger request: to bear the king’s standard on the battlefield — a seemingly fatal wish.
The harpist is Merlin, disguised, though the members of court realize this only long afterward. “The standard, thanks to Merlin’s magic, can become this magical dragon who blows fire on the battlefield,” Ms. Fabry-Tehranchi said.
At the time of its creation, the manuscript was “a luxury item,” she added, most likely imported to England by aristocrats familiar with Old French as the Arthurian romances grew in popularity. But as the stories were translated into English, the value of such manuscripts fell.
Unless one had a bunch of deeds or the like lying around and in need of a little binding. That may explain how someone at Huntingfield Manor in Suffolk in the 16th century settled on the old parchment as a bit of raw material to strengthen a ledger.
The manor’s collection came to Cambridge in the 1970s, but it was only in 2019 that an archivist realized that the hidden manuscript deserved a closer look. The painstaking process wound up taking years, given that the fragile, battered manuscript had been recycled inside a book that was itself centuries old.
“We really needed to go into the nooks and crannies of this object,” Ms. Fabry-Tehranchi said.
Restorers used multispectral imaging, which relies on different wavelengths of light like ultraviolet and infrared, to reveal details in the manuscript that the naked eye could not spot. With help from their colleagues in the zoology department, they also employed a CT scanner usually used for fossils to uncover the parchment’s layers without physically dismantling the book.
The restorers also used mirrors, magnets, prisms and other tools to take hundreds of photographs of parts of the manuscript that were hidden under folds or stitched into the binding. The result was a sort of medieval, Old French jigsaw puzzle that had to be assembled into a legible text.
“This project is fabulous primarily for its use of new technology to recover the material culture of the past, which may survive physically but remain inaccessible for a variety of reasons,” said Hannah Weaver, a professor of medieval literature at Columbia University, who was not involved in the work.
It was not just the innovative use of imaging, Dr. Weaver said. It was what came next, and what it might mean for other researchers.
“It was the digital unfolding that really astonished me,” she said. “I can’t wait to see that new technique applied on other tricky in-situ manuscripts.”
Ms. Fabry-Tehranchi expressed a similar hope.
“There are still things to be discovered,” she said.