Which is our oldest manuscript?

The oldest surviving manuscript is a parchment fragment dating from around 830. It comes from the monastery of Fulda (Germany), whose extensive library was almost completely destroyed during the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). According to recent research, the manuscript to which our leaf belonged must have left Fulda around the middle of the ^16th century.

We don’t know what happened to the rest of the volume, but a close look at our fragment reveals folds which suggest that this piece of parchment, a material which at the time was very valuable, was reused to wrap something – probably a batch of archival documents. Unfortunately, the fact that our fragment doesn’t even represent a full page of text makes identification difficult.

No problem! Researchers have discovered that our fragment contains a description of the Gothic people by Jordanès (a ^6th-century author), thanks to the text in red that not only concludes our fragment, but had also concluded the original volume: “Explicit de antiquitate Getarum actusque eorum […]. ” This formula, which begins with “explicit”, is typical of medieval manuscripts and indicates the end of the text that has just been written. Thanks to the BCUL’s collaboration with e-codices and the Institut Bibliotheca Fuldensis, which aims to identify and digitally group together manuscripts that belonged to the Fulda library and escaped destruction, our fragment is now available online.

Ramona, Curator of the Manuscript Department