Textual Stowaways: Unseen Early Modern Travels of Medieval Texts

Description

Texts travel in a variety of ways, both deliberate and serendipitous. Deliberate movements occurred through repeated processes of scribal copying, and through the physical exchanges of books via borrowing, sale, or bequest; the translation of authors' works from one language to another constituted another mode of intentional travel. But texts also travelled accidentally, often in less visible ways. The use of waste manuscript and printed materials in the bindings of early modern books resulted in serendipitous journeys which are only now being uncovered: one famous example discovered in St Andrews in the last century was the survival of small sections of the medieval romance King Alisaunder within a copy of Horace (printed in Paris,1543; the binding is English or Scottish, done before 1620) - a notable find, since the parchment fragments rightly belong to the famous Auchinleck manuscript (NLS Advocates MS 19.2.1). This paper highlights some more recently uncovered examples of such medieval textual stowaways in early modern books within the University of St Andrews Special Collections. It focuses on examples that involve incunabula and early printed books of German origin with a dozen such books, printed in Cologne, Ulm Nuremberg, Wittenberg, and Frankfurt between 1470 and 1550, identified for investigation. An initial survey suggests that the manuscript waste discovered within their bindings includes Latin texts (religious, medical, scientific, legal) from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Period	11 Nov 2021
Held at	Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich, Germany
Degree of Recognition	International