Seventeen fragments of medieval manuscripts have been identified on Guernsey, where they had been repurposed as book bindings during the 16th and 17th centuries. Until their discovery, historians had found very little evidence of medieval-era libraries, book collections or literary culture on the island.
The fragments were found by staff at Island Archives, Guernsey's historical records division. Callum Tostevin-Hall, an archives assistant there, discovered a reference to a vellum cover bearing Latin text while searching for a specific 16th-century notebook. According to Tostevin-Hall, the cover had been conserved at some point and had a modern cover placed on it, and it showed signs that it had once been part of a late medieval manuscript.
Vikki Hart, an archivist at Island Archives, characterizes the fragments as striking early examples of recycling. She says the reuse of old parchment as book bindings preserved pieces of Guernsey's history that would otherwise have been lost.
Among the texts identified is a fragment of "La Lumere as Lais," a 13th-century religious poem written in Anglo-Norman French that sought to explain Christian beliefs and religious practices to its readers. Researchers also uncovered several Bible fragments, including a Latin passage from the late 12th century and another marked with an early 15th-century annotation.
Another fragment comes from L'Estoire de Griseldis, a retelling of the Griselda story, which originated in Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron and was later adapted into Latin by Petrarch and into French by Philippe de Mézières; various adaptations of the tale spread across Europe in the late medieval period. This particular version of L'Estoire de Griseldis survives in only one other manuscript, along with two later printed editions from the 16th century. According to Tostevin-Hall, the fragment sheds light on how the text was copied, shared and preserved over time.
Tostevin-Hall said the fragments form an important corpus of documents about the literary culture of late medieval Guernsey. Many of the rediscovered texts are written in Latin, but six are in French — notable, researchers say, because when medieval Guernsey readers encountered vernacular literary texts, French was more prominent than English.
David Rundle, a historian at the University of Kent who helped identify the fragments, said the Guernsey collection contains more nonreligious fragments than would be expected from other regions affected by the Reformation, when the dissolution of the monasteries in England often involved the breaking up of manuscripts. Separately, Rundle noted that French was available in England throughout the Middle Ages as a literary language even as its use was declining there by the end of the period; on Guernsey, he said, French appears to have continued to be significant at the end of the Middle Ages.