Please ensure Javascript is enabled for purposes ofwebsite accessibility
General Alert
Total Solar Eclipse
Show More
Close Alert

Students at RIT discover hidden 15th century text in ancient manuscript


A multidisciplinary team of students, Including Lisa Enochs, left, created the imaging system for their Innovative Freshman Experience class. (Photo: Gabrielle Plucknette-DeVito / RIT)
A multidisciplinary team of students, Including Lisa Enochs, left, created the imaging system for their Innovative Freshman Experience class. (Photo: Gabrielle Plucknette-DeVito / RIT)
Facebook Share IconTwitter Share IconEmail Share Icon

(WHAM) - It seems like an idea out of an Indiana Jones film.

Students analyzing medieval manuscripts at Rochester Institute of Technology were able to uncover lost text on manuscript leaves from the 15th century. The tools they used to find the text? An imaging system they helped to develop as freshmen.

Zoë LaLena, Lisa Enochs, and Malcolm Zale - all second-year students - were part of a cohort of 19 students in a year-long course at the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science. The program is called the Innovative Freshman Experience and brings together students from the imaging science, motion picture science, and photographic sciences. In the middle of the course, the coronavirus pandemic forced RIT to have all students go fully remote and the project was put on hold.

A donation from an alumnus allowed LaLena, Enochs, and Zale to resume working on the project over the summer and finish assembling it when classes resumed for the fall 2020 semester.

The imaging system uses ultraviolet and fluorescent lights to reveal certain chemicals invisible to the naked eye. Once the system was ready, several medieval-era parchments from the Cary Collection at RIT were placed under the lights and revealed other writings.

“This was amazing because this document has been in the Cary Collection for about a decade now and no one noticed," LaLena said.

The parchment was determined to be a palimpsest, a manuscript on parchment with multiple layers of writing. During this time period, making parchment was very expensive, so leaves had to be reused by scraping them off, or erasing the text and reusing them.

"There’s 30 other known pages from this book, it’s really fascinating that the 29 other pages we know the location of have the potential to also be palimpsests," LaLena said.

“The students have supplied incredibly important information about at least two of our manuscript leaves here in the collection and in a sense have discovered two texts that we didn’t know were in the collection,” said Steven Galbraith, curator of the Cary Graphic Arts Collection. “Now we have to figure out what those texts are and that’s the power of spectral imaging in cultural institutions. To fully understand our own collections, we need to know the depth of our collections, and imaging science helps reveal all of that to us.”

The students are working to see if more manuscripts from this collection contain lost writings. They are reaching out to other curators across the country and working with paleographers to see what information the texts may contain.

Loading ...