Museum Visitors Came for Old Books, Found Older Ones Inside

Bergen Cathedral School was founded in 1153. Its library dates from 1774 and is the oldest in the city. It holds nearly five hundred books from the 1500s and 1600s, and you would think that was old enough for anyone.

In April two educators from the Bergen City Museum, Espen Kutschera and Baard Skogrand, came to look at them. Inside several of the books they found writing that was older than the books. “We were astonished when we saw reinforcements made from medieval manuscript pages,” Kutschera said afterwards.

They had come to borrow the exhibits, and parts of the exhibits were holding the exhibits together.

This is how thousands of medieval books survived at all. Parchment is tough, and binders needed something tough. So pages from old service books went into the spines and covers of new printed ones, and stayed there, out of sight, for four hundred years. Many of the school’s volumes turned out to have covers made of medieval parchment.

One of the people who knows those shelves best is Jan Støren, a former assistant principal who has worked in the library since 2013 and now volunteers there. “I believe we have far more books from the 1500s and 1600s than most people realize,” he told the University of Bergen.

The finds went to Professor Åslaug Ommundsen, who has spent more than twenty years on medieval Latin fragments and leads CODICUM, a Nordic research project with around 50,000 of them in its database. “I wasn’t aware that the Bergen Cathedral School had quite so many old books,” she said. In June one of the project’s researchers came to the library to look for himself.

I have been inspired to check our own shelves. Books in a family that has moved five times are not so much a library as a geological record.

The cookbook from Madrid held a parking fine from Madrid. The atlas held a permission slip for a trip the eldest went on in 2019, unsigned, which explains a great deal about 2019. Inside the youngest’s copy of a book about volcanoes I found a note, in her handwriting, reading “DO NOT TELL MUMMY ABOUT THE CARPET”.

I have not been told about the carpet. Like the medieval scribes, the author is unavailable for comment. Unlike Professor Ommundsen, I am not sure I want the full transcription.