Modern Technology Reveals Ancient Secrets
Though medieval manuscripts might not immediately bring to mind high-end technology, the University of Oklahoma’s Bill Endres has mixed the two worlds to bring to light letters and texts that in some cases have been lost for centuries.
Endres, an assistant professor in OU’s English department, uses advanced imaging techniques in the study of the St. Chad Gospels, which reside at Lichfield Cathedral in Lichfield, England. The St. Chad Gospels contain the earliest surviving examples of Old Welsh writing.
One of the ways that Endres has examined the manuscripts are through multispectral imaging, capturing light frequencies from ultraviolet to infrared. In many cases, this process reveals writing that has been damaged or otherwise was unreadable in its visible state.
Another avenue that has turned up hidden mysteries is the examination of “dry point writing,” which was etched with a stylus but no ink, and often meant to go unnoticed. This writing can be brought out using Reflectance Transformation Imaging, or RTI.
“Sometimes there’s notes for a sermon; in the case of the St. Chad Gospels what they did was use dry point to write names,” Endres said.
During his work on the St. Chad Gospels, Endres found a listing of three Anglo-Saxon female names, which suggested women may have been involved as scribes for the book during the medieval period.
Images of the data on the manuscript’s pages have been captured for use in a virtual reality system as well, allowing researchers to fully immerse themselves in a 3-D world of the writing and images.
Some of the techniques began in seemingly unlikely places. The free graphics analysis software ImageJ was developed by the National Institutes of Health to use on medical images. But since manuscripts are often made from animal skins, analytical approaches for medical images frequently also work on manuscripts.
Endres goes over these processes and others in his new book, Digitizing Medieval Manuscripts: The St. Chad Gospels, Materiality, Recoveries and Representation in 2D & 3D.
Endres has also taken the show on the road. Last year, he received a $5,000 Forum Grant Award from the OU Humanities Forum at OU that included funding to build a traveling Virtual Reality Workstation for Experiencing and Studying Medieval Manuscripts. In the future, he hopes to set up a Virtual Reality Workstation in Lichfield and guide virtual exploration of the St. Chad Gospels for the cathedral community and visitors from his office in Norman.
You can explore these images at the website https://lichfield.ou.edu/
Article Published: Thursday, November 7, 2019