Reused Notebook Covers Reveal Guernsey’s Hidden Medieval Literary World

Seventeenth-century notebooks in Guernsey’s archives have turned out to contain pieces of a much older story: 17 fragments from medieval manuscripts that once circulated on the island. The fragments date from the 12th through the 15th centuries. They were apparently removed from their original manuscripts during the 16th and 17th centuries and reused as covers or bindings for notebooks containing administrative records. That practical recycling eventually protected portions of texts that might otherwise have disappeared. The discovery began when Callum Tostevin-Hall, an archives assistant at Island Archives, was searching for a 16th-century notebook. A database entry mentioned that the volume’s original vellum cover had been removed during conservation and stored elsewhere, along with Latin writing. When Tostevin-Hall located the cover, he found evidence that it had once belonged to a late medieval manuscript. Further examination led researchers to a broader group of fragments. David Rundle, a historian at the University of Kent who helped identify the material, said the collection was notable because little evidence of medieval libraries, book collections or literary life had previously survived on Guernsey. The island is a self-governing British Crown Dependency in the English Channel, about 30 miles from Normandy, France. The texts point to a varied reading culture. Researchers identified a section of “La Lumere as Lais,” a 13th-century religious poem written in Anglo-Norman French, along with several Bible fragments. One Latin passage dates to the late 12th century, while another includes an annotation from the early 15th century. Another fragment comes from “L’Estoire de Griseldis,” a French retelling of the Griselda story associated with works by Giovanni Boccaccio, Petrarch and Philippe de Mézières. The particular version is known from only one other manuscript and two later 16th-century printed editions, according to the source report. Six of the fragments are written in French, while many others are in Latin. Researchers say that distribution suggests French remained an important literary language on Guernsey even as its use was declining in England during the later Middle Ages. Archivist Vikki Hart described the fragments as early examples of recycling whose unintended result was the preservation of pieces of Guernsey’s history.