How exciting to find hoarded/forgotten texts in an age when non destructive palimpsest analysis through modern imaging techniques has improved leaps and bounds.
Who knows what lies underneath the top layers of usage?
Texts were copied laboriously by hand. Each one carrys stories of where it came from. It could inform trade links from monastic scribe houses across the globe. It could have DNA fragments of value.
It almost certainly has pictures of cats in it, somewhere. Doing strange things with snails.
Imagine finding an ancient/medieval text discussing evolution by natural selection, the indivisible nature of the atom, heliocentricity, and the existence of a unified theory of physics, all written by an author who lived in the 1st century BCE. Such was the discovery of 15th century manuscript collector Poggio Bracciolini, who discovered a surviving copy of De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things [1]) in a Benedictine monastery. The lost work of Lucretius inspired many Enlightenment thinkers and led people to challenge the orthodoxies of that time.
Who knows what lies underneath the top layers of usage?
Texts were copied laboriously by hand. Each one carrys stories of where it came from. It could inform trade links from monastic scribe houses across the globe. It could have DNA fragments of value.
It almost certainly has pictures of cats in it, somewhere. Doing strange things with snails.