Palimpsests in Danger Project
2022-2024, Fondazione Biblioteca Capitolare di Verona ETS, Italy.
The “Palimpsests in Danger Project” tackles a critical challenge in manuscript studies: the severe damage inflicted upon thousands of palimpsests by 19th-century scholars. In their eagerness to recover erased undertexts, these early researchers often applied harsh chemical reagents, which, while sometimes effective in their time, permanently stained the parchment dark brown or black, obscuring much of the writing they sought to reveal. Today, these chemically treated manuscripts, housed in major libraries worldwide, are among the most valuable yet most severely compromised.
This ambitious 18-month pilot study, managed by the UCLA Library, the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library (EMEL), and the Fondazione Biblioteca Capitolare di Verona, aims to determine if and how the information on these endangered palimpsests can be recovered. It brings together a consortium of international experts and cutting-edge imaging techniques, including multispectral imaging (MSI), scanning micro-X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (µXRF), and Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT). The project is designed in phases: an initial phase of data collection and comparison to identify best practices for imaging, followed by a second phase to test and refine these recommendations on a larger selection of folios.
The ultimate goal is to make the processed images from both phases widely available on the UCLA Library Digital Collections website, ensuring long-term accessibility and searchability for researchers globally. By leveraging modern scientific imaging, the “Palimpsests in Danger Project” represents a crucial effort to retrieve lost knowledge from these historically significant, yet chemically scarred, manuscripts, offering a potential last chance to decipher their hidden texts.
Project participants: The Lazarus Project (University of Rochester), Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC), Nicolaus Copernicus University
