Researchers Discovered a Rare 13th-Century Manuscript. It Was Hiding in Plain Sight All Along.

Yahoo

17-04-2025

A fragment of a 13th century piece of French prose was discovered, having been used as the binding for pages of a 16th-century property record in the University of Cambridge library.
The fragment was a portion of a manuscript, Suite Vulgate du Merlin—fewer than 40 examples of which have survived.
The team was able to 'virtually unfold' the fragment without damaging the artifact itself.
This story is a collaboration with Biography.com
As the great astronomer Carl Sagan once said: 'If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time.' And that is not even considering the books that may, apparently, be hiding inside the binding of other books.
That's something Cambridge University Library had to contend with in 2019, when they found that a property record from Huntingfield Manor in Suffolk was bound together by an even older manuscript, previously undiscovered. Now the book which became binding has been identified, and it's safe to say it's a bit more of a page-turner than the pages it once bound together.
In a recently published article, the University of Cambridge announced that the uncovered manuscript has been deciphered, digitized, and determined to be a fragment of the prose work Suite Vulgate du Merlin. Described by Cambridge as a 'French-language sequel to the legend of King Arthur,' this work was part of a larger story cycle written in approximately 1230-1240 known as the Lancelot-Grail cycle.
While most may not be reading Suite Vulgate du Merlin today, it's more a part of our understanding of Arthurian legend than we might realize. As noted in Romance Rewritten: The Evolution of Middle English Romance, this particular work was likely one of the major sources utilized by Sir Thomas Mallory in writing his 1485 Le Morte d'Arthur—the most famous and influential English-language telling of the King Arthur story.
'There are less than 40 surviving manuscripts of the Suite Vulgate du Merlin,' Cambridge notes, 'with each one unique since they were individually handwritten by medieval scribes.' This specific fragment, written in Old French, contained two stories from the latter portion of the Suite Vulgate. The first depicts the Battle of Cambénic, where the famed Arthurian figure Sir Gawain (written here as Gauvain)—wielding Excalibur atop his horse, Gringalet—does battle with the Saxon Kings Dodalis, Moydas, Oriancés, and Brandalus. This particular manuscript, it was noted, spelled Dodalis' name as Doralis.
The second episode described Merlin arriving at King Arthur's court during the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, disguised through his magic as a harpist. In their article, Cambridge published an excerpt of their translation:
'While they were rejoicing in the feast, and Kay the seneschal brought the first dish to King Arthur and Queen Guinevere, there arrived the most handsome man ever seen in Christian lands. He was wearing a silk tunic girded by a silk harness woven with gold and precious stones which glittered with such brightness that it illuminated the whole room.'
But translating the fragment was more than just a challenge of linguistics. 'Traditional methods of conservation might have involved physically removing the binding to unfold the fragment,' they note, 'but this risked causing irreparable damage.'
'It's not just about the text itself, but also about the material artifact,'
Irène Fabry-Tehranchi, a French specialist in collections and academic liaison at Cambridge University Library, said. 'The way it was reused tells us about archival practices in 16th-century England. It's a piece of history in its own right.'
Having ultimately decided to leave it be, the university then had to find a way to 'virtually unfold and digitise' the fragment without removing it. This process required a multidisciplinary team from across numerous departments, but through an arduous sequence of efforts—including multispectral imaging, computed tomography (CT) scanning, and 3D imaging—experts were able to manipulate this digital replica of the fragment in order to 'simulate what the document might look like if it were physically opened.'
Both the discovery of the fragment and the manner in which it was deciphered could serve as inspiration for medieval research in the future. It reminds researchers to look for these lost works in places they might not expect, and demonstrates how to save the stories they contain from the ravages of time—without ruining the pages that hold them.
It may not be a spell from Merlin, but it's a type of magic all its own.
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