#700 year old manuscript full

He said he likes the history and beauty of the parchment - and the story of how he stumbled upon it.

But Sideri said he has no intention of selling it. The parchment is worth upward of $10,000, according to Davis. It's a treasure both because of its age and condition, which is far better than the other page in the Colby collection, said Megan Cook, Sideri's former professor, who teaches medieval literature at Colby. The page purchased by Sideri is of particular interest to scholars. ET This photo provided by Will Sideri shows a 700-year-old manuscript that was used in the Beauvais Cathedral in France. All told, the missal numbered 309 pages in its original form. 'Thousands of unique manuscripts were destroyed and scattered this way,' Davis said.ĭavis has painstakingly researched The Beauvais Missal and has tracked down more than 100 individual pages across the country. The practice was common in the early 20th century.

#700 year old manuscript full

The full missal was once owned by William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper publisher, before being sold in the 1940s and, much to the consternation of today's academics, was divvied up into individual pages, she said. A bargain hunter who went to an estate sale in Maine to find a KitchenAid mixer, a bookshelf or vintage clothing walked away with a 700-year-old treasure. The parchment was part of a prayer book and priests' liturgy, said Lisa Fagin Davis, executive director of the Medieval Academy of America and a professor of manuscript studies at Simmons University in Boston.