HN Reader

The fact that a 13th-century Arthurian manuscript was quietly hiding inside a 16th-century book cover for centuries is wild enough on its own, but the way they virtually unfolded it without causing damage feels almost as magical as the story of Merlin itself

A really nicely presented exposition of the benefits of an institutions intra-departmental work.

Here's the manuscript itself for page-by-page viewing:

https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-VANNECK-BOX-00005-A-FOLIO...

Once you know that _usually_ people use white cotton gloves when handling museum artifacts, I find it a bit distressing that the person halfway down the article is not wearing any while holding the priceless 700-year-old pages.

Was this 'unfolding' similar to how the burned library at Pompeii had some ashen scrolls revealed?

Too bad all the photos in the article are all so small. I would have enjoyed them in larger size.

Disappointment alert: It wasn't fireball scrolls or a recipe for healing potions. It's a medieval rom-com.

I believe one of the early maps of the americas by Amerigo Vespucci was found in a similar way. Re-using paper to hand making the binding, padding the covers, wrapping the bound signatures before the outer leather or board was added was surprisingly common. John Le Carré uses it in "the perfect spy" as a mechanism to pass secret information to an amateur book binder.

It speaks to me of Robert Grave's fictitious account of Claudius deciding rather than hiding them, to leave his (fictional) autobiographical scrolls just lying around, let history decide what to keep and what to dispose of.

"La suite vulgate du Merlin" might translate as: "the vulgate follow up of THE Merlin", which I find quite curious. Modern French would rather say: "DE Merlin". It was as if Merlin was not a proper name but the name of some creature of the Merlin species, or some kind of properties.

The page refreshes when I scroll 80% down….

I find these modern web page layouts, with peek-a-boo sections, independently scrolling columns, and other unnecessary fancy features to be frustrating to read, which is somewhat ironic since the story is about a difficult to read 13th century manuscript.