Researchers Use Multispectral Imaging to Recover 42 Pages of Erased Sixth-Century Pauline Manuscript

Researchers have recovered 42 long-lost pages from Codex H, a sixth-century manuscript containing a copy of the Letters of St. Paul, using advanced imaging technology to reveal text invisible to the naked eye. The University of Glasgow announced the discovery in an April 24 press release.

The international team was led by University of Glasgow professor Garrick Allen and worked in partnership with the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library. Codex H, formally known as GA 015, is a palimpsest whose parchment was reused and rewritten over the centuries. The manuscript had been re-inked at some point in its working life.

The chemicals in the new ink caused offset damage to facing pages, creating a mirror image of the original text on opposing leaves. The offset damage sometimes left traces several pages deep that are barely visible to the naked eye. Researchers used multispectral imaging to process images of the surviving pages and recover ghost text.

The recovered ghost text no longer physically exists on the pages. The manuscript was dismantled in the 13th century by monks at the Great Lavra Monastery on Mount Athos. The dismantled parchment was reused as binding material for other books.

The surviving fragments are now scattered across libraries in Italy, Greece, Russia, Ukraine and France. The fragments reveal how sixth-century scribes corrected, annotated and interacted with sacred texts. They also show how books were repurposed once they fell into disrepair.

Codex H is an important witness to the text of Paul’s Letters in a period where we don’t have that many manuscripts, Garrick Allen said, referring to the sixth through ninth centuries. The manuscript contains more than 70 textual corrections by a scribe who cross-referenced it against another manuscript.

It holds annotations from at least 15 later readers who left behind prayers, poems and grammatical notes.

These annotations are often the only tangible evidence left that these anonymous people existed, Garrick Allen said. The manuscript likely reached the end of its working life after six to seven centuries of use. A digital edition of the recovered pages is freely available to the public and scholars for the first time in centuries.

A print edition of the recovered pages is forthcoming. The recovered pages include ancient chapter lists which differ drastically from how we divide these letters today. The Washington Times reported that the project offers a model for future work on difficult manuscripts.

Although each manuscript is by definition unique and presents its own challenges, we think that we’ve developed a model for working with challenging manuscripts like palimpsests at a larger scale, Garrick Allen said.