{"id":40449,"date":"2025-06-19T11:15:43","date_gmt":"2025-06-19T09:15:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bcu-lausanne.ch\/which-is-our-oldest-manuscript\/"},"modified":"2025-06-19T11:15:48","modified_gmt":"2025-06-19T09:15:48","slug":"which-is-our-oldest-manuscript","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bcu-lausanne.ch\/en\/our-collections\/which-is-our-oldest-manuscript\/","title":{"rendered":"Which is our oldest manuscript?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The oldest surviving manuscript is a parchment fragment dating from around 830. It comes from the monastery of Fulda (Germany), whose extensive library<\/a> 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<\/sup> century. <\/p>\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n

No problem! Researchers have discovered that our fragment contains a description of the Gothic people by Jordan\u00e8s (a 6th-century<\/sup> author), thanks to the text in red that not only concludes our fragment, but had also concluded the original volume: \u201cExplicit de antiquitate Getarum actusque eorum […]. <\/em>\u201d This formula, which begins with \u201cexplicit\u201d, 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<\/em> and the Institut Bibliotheca Fuldensis<\/em>, which aims to identify and digitally group together manuscripts that belonged to the Fulda library and escaped destruction, our fragment is now available online<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n

Ramona, Curator of the Manuscript Department<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The oldest manuscript in the library is a parchment fragment dating from around 830.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":14326,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_oasis_is_in_workflow":0,"_oasis_original":0,"_oasis_task_priority":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1343],"coauthors":[634],"class_list":["post-40449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-our-collections"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhich is our oldest manuscript? - BCUL<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.bcu-lausanne.ch\/en\/our-collections\/which-is-our-oldest-manuscript\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Which is our oldest manuscript? 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