Manuscripts 'treated as fossils'

[Dover]

Manuscripts 'treated as fossils'

An ancient text can tell a historian fascinating stories about the people and the culture that created it.
A palaeontologist has come up with a novel way of studying historical manuscripts, by treating them as fossils from an extinct species.
John Cisne, writing in Science magazine, says manuscripts from the Middle Ages have a lot in common with animal populations.

...snip...

He took a small number of medieval scientific manuscripts, such as Bede's De Temporum Ratione from AD 725, and examined them as if they were fossils from an extinct population.

By applying models usually used for explaining population dynamics in the animal kingdom, he says he can estimate the size and durability of an extinct "population" of manuscripts.

In very simplistic terms, he would take some copies of a manuscript and work out their age range (for example, 10 might have been from AD 800, five might have been from AD 750, and one might have been from AD 700).

From that information, he would determine how many manuscripts were probably around at any one time, what their rate of "population growth" was and how often they were destroyed.

"By using this technique, you can get at the likelihood of a manuscript being destroyed - how likely it was that it would be burned in a fire or eaten by rats," he told the BBC News website.

"When you look at the age distribution of the manuscripts - how many survived from which century - you can get an idea of the balance between the likelihood of a manuscript being copied - or 'reproducing' - versus the probability of the individual being destroyed - or 'dying'." ..cont'd

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4294943.stm