60% of medieval knight tales lost to time

Before the invention of the printing press, the only way to make a copy of a text was by hand. Whether intentionally or by accident, the copy wasn’t always identical to the original, and the differences carried over into all the other copies made from the new version. This is also akin to how genetic mutations spread in populations across evolutionary history.

People first noticed the similarities between the genealogy of species and the genealogy of manuscripts in the 19th century, Julien Randon-Furling, a mathematician at Centre Borelli in the École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay, tells Popular Science. Randon-Furling studies the intersection of mathematical sciences and humanities, among other disciplines.

Following in the footsteps of polymath Michael P. Weitzman who, in the 1970s and 1980s, applied mathematics to manuscript genealogy, he and colleagues used computer models to reconstruct and simulate the spread of chivalric narratives starting in the 1100s. Chivalric literature is a genre that dates back to the medieval period and frequently portrays the adventures of knights.

Image: Bodleian Library, Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek

By reconstructing the branches of how various medieval texts were copied and disseminated over the centuries, the team was able to estimate how much of the entire tree survived. Their results, published in PNAS Nexus study, indicate that up to 60 percent of chivalric texts and over 95 percent of chivalric manuscripts might have been lost to history. While that may sound extreme, it actually bolsters previous theories.

“Philologists and historians have known for quite a long time that the amount of loss was impressive,” explains Ulysse Godreau, a co-author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at the Ecole nationale des chartes, Paris Sciences & Lettres University. The team wanted to “confirm or infirm these estimates and maybe enrich them via more dynamical quantity studies.”

In fact, what makes this study unique is how it understands manuscript genealogy and texts’ endurance as a dynamic process, according to Jean-Baptiste Camps, principal investigator of the study and a computational philologist at the École nationale des chartes, Paris Sciences & Lettres University. Their approach accounts for time as an influencing factor. It also considers the consequences of events such as wars, pandemics, or even the decreasing popularity of a work on text genealogy, allowing researchers to align the proposed theory with historical information.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, if only a few copies of a text were made in its first few years, it’s very likely that it will have been lost, another factor that was included and quantified in their computer models. The team’s study indicates that, because of this and other potential reasons, random accidents, important historical events like the plague, the original version of most chivalric texts have likely disappeared.

While the study might come across as grim, it provides a tool to better understand not just history, but what we don’t know of that history, Randon-Furling emphasizes.

“One of the driving questions for us was, how much of the past do we have in our hands?” he explains. “Because if you tell me that the manuscripts that we have represent 90 percent or even 50 percent or 25 percent of what existed, or if they represent less than 5 percent of what existed, it’s a completely different story, a completely different picture of the past.”

Now, the team is aiming to investigate the genealogy of even older texts, such as ancient Greek plays. The team has already taken a stab at texts from the Church fathers.

Furthermore, the researchers say they plan “to widen our approach by taking into accounts cultural transfers between different regions and languages in Medieval Europe, from France to Iceland or Spain. Different regions could function like different ‘ecosystems,’ with different results in terms of diversity of texts or their survival,” explains Camps. “Some elements already hint at differences between ‘insular’ and continental settings.”

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