Can the character represent a nun? Image via BBC.
Who does not know her from school: in many books the former owners immortalized themselves with small drawings. Sometimes you can still tell who the creator of the graphic was by looking at the font or the abbreviation of its name, but most of the time it remains a mystery forever.
It seems that this is nothing new for humanity. Drawings of a previous owner have been discovered in a 1,300-year-old book. But since they may have just been scratched out and not created in ink, it takes modern technology to make them truly visible (via BBC.com).
Notes in an old book
The book copy of Luke’s Acts, kept in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, is about 1,300 years old. The eighth-century book probably belonged to a woman, whose name was previously unknown.
Researcher Jessica Hodgkinson took a closer look at the book in 2022 and found scratches in the paper on some of the pages, made with a writing instrument without ink.
The Edburgh mass is difficult to decipher. Image via BBC.
The carvings have now been digitally rendered on the computer and reveal a short note possibly written by the book’s author: “EaDBURG BIREð CǷ….N”.
Edburgh was probably the name of the owner, an abbot from the county of Kent. The incomplete words were then difficult to decipher, but it was possible, according to the BBC article bore cward
Means what in Old English prison
he is called.
The note appears alongside the capture of the apostles in Luke’s Acts. Therefore, Hodgkinson suspects that Reverend Edburgh drew parallels between her life situation and the imprisonment of the Apostles.
small figures
On other pages of Luke’s Acts, Hodgkinson and her colleagues find scratched drawings of several characters. It shows a diagram of three people looking at a person with outstretched arms. It appears that someone is bending over (shown in the image below, left).
Whether it was Edburgh or someone else who engraved the characters in the book is unknown. Image via BBC.
Another diagram (top left) shows a figure with outstretched arms, possibly wearing a robe. This may be a nun. Finally, in the photo below on the right, a person can be seen showing their back to another person while visibly extending their left hand (Does anyone have Talk to the hand
He said?).
Laser technology makes this possible
the hidden
Pictures can only be seen through new technology that can digitize the surface of books, book pages, and almost anything else historical.
Two different devices are used. device used by researchers Celine
It uses four cameras that can detect differences in surfaces as small as 25 microns. The other device is called Lucida
It can create 3D scans of a surface using two cameras and a laser.
The Oxford researchers are sure that more previously undiscovered drawings will be found in historical works in the future.
Would you have thought that hundreds of years ago, when books were more expensive and rare than they are today, people would immortalize themselves in them? Feel free to write your opinion in the comments.
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