from
https://phys.org/news/2022-02-medieval-chivalry-heroism-manuscripts-lost.html

90% of medieval chivalry and heroism manuscripts have been lost
by University of Oxford
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

New research released today finds that while the Knights of the Round
Table have won global fame, most medieval English heroic or chivalric
stories have been lost. Meanwhile, more than three quarters of medieval
stories in Icelandic and Irish survive to the present, in an unusual
pattern suggesting island "ecosystems" helped preserve culture.

The findings come from an international research team, including Oxford
experts, which has applied statistical models used in ecology to
estimate the loss and survival of precious artifacts and narratives from
different parts of Europe. This ecological approach offers a new
perspective on the loss of cultural heritage, complementing past
research. Their findings are published in the journal Science, with Mike
Kestemont (University of Antwerp) and Folgert Karsdorp (KNAW Meertens
Institute) as the main authors.

Dr. Katarzyna Anna Kapitan, an Old Norse philologist and Junior Research
Fellow at Linacre College, Oxford, says, "By using statistical methods
borrowed from ecology, we were able to add to previous scholarship.

"We estimate that more than 90 percent of medieval manuscripts
preserving chivalric and heroic narratives have been lost. This
corresponds roughly to the scale of loss that book historians had
estimated using different approaches. Moreover, we were able to estimate
that some 32 percent of chivalric and heroic works from the Middle Ages
have been lost over the centuries."

The team used 'unseen species models' from ecology to gauge the loss of
narratives from medieval Europe, such as romances about King Arthur, or
heroic legends about Sigurd the dragon slayer or the legendary ruler
Ragnar lóðbrok, known to wider audiences from the TV series "Vikings."
The estimates of loss and survival they obtained are compatible with the
scant historical evidence.

The study revealed significant differences in survival rates for
medieval works and manuscripts in different languages, suggesting that
Irish tradition of medieval narrative fiction is best preserved, while
works in English suffered the most severe losses. The team calculated
that around 81 percent of medieval Irish romances and adventure tales
survive today, compared to only 38 percent of similar works in English.
Similarly, results suggest that around 19 percent of medieval Irish
manuscript books survive, compared to only 7 percent of English examples.

Dr. Daniel Sawyer, Fitzjames Research Fellow in Medieval English
Literature at Merton College, Oxford, says, "We found notably low
estimated survival rates for medieval fiction in English. We might blame
the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, which did scatter
many libraries. But heroic stories in English rarely appear in the
library catalogs of monasteries and friaries in the first place."

"Another possible explanation might be found in the limited prestige of
the English language during this period," Dr. Sawyer continues. "Today,
English is learned as a second language all over the world but, during
the Middle Ages, it had little international significance. After the
Norman Conquest, in particular, French was important in England as an
international language of power and culture, and the English crown owned
parts of what is now France.

"In fact, if we add fiction written in Norman French in England to the
evidence in English, the survival rate for English evidence looks more
like the rates for other languages. This shows the importance of Norman
French to English culture, and suggests heroic stories in Norman French
and in English formed a connected tradition."

Meanwhile, Dr. Kapitan explains it is a very different picture for
Iceland, where, she says, "We know today around three out of four
medieval Icelandic romances and adventure tales (or 77 percent), but
only one out of six medieval manuscripts preserving these works (17
percent)."

Besides events such as library fires and the recycling of books, the
research identifies the original 'evenness' of cultural production as an
overlooked factor in the survival of ancient artifacts.

Dr. Kapitan says, "Our research has revealed interesting similarities
between Icelandic and Irish evidence. Icelandic and Irish literatures
both have high survival rates for medieval works and manuscripts, and
also very similar "evenness profiles." This means the average number of
manuscripts that preserve medieval works is more evenly distributed than
in other traditions we examined."

"The similarities between Iceland and Ireland may be caused by lasting
traditions of copying literary texts by hand long after the invention of
print," explains Dr. Kapitan.

Dr. Sawyer adds, "The evidence might tell us about England's ties to
continental Europe in the Middle Ages, and about the influence of wider
European culture on English writing. England's size and its very close
links to the Continent could explain why the English evidence doesn't
display the evenness found in the island distributions of stories in
Iceland and Ireland."

These analyses call for a wider application of these methods across the
heritage sciences. The researchers agree that the collaboration between
disciplines has been very stimulating. As Dr. Kapitan concludes, "This
shows how trans-disciplinary research lets us step beyond anecdotal
case-studies of single scribes or texts, and allows large comparisons
across different places, traditions, and languages."

Explore further

Medieval writers' plagiarism resurrected by technology
More information: Mike Kestemont, Forgotten Books: The Application of
Unseen Species Models to the Survival of Culture, Science (1970). DOI:
10.1126/science.abl7655. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abl7655
Journal information: Science
Provided by University of Oxford