A Montreal university is preserving a rare 1000-year-old manuscript

Montreal is now home to a rare parchment which is part of a manuscript that is more than 1,000 years old.

Montreal is now home to a rare parchment, part of a manuscript that is more than a thousand years old.

It’s one of eight new acquisitions the Université de Montreal is adding to its Rare Books and Special Collections Library.

Librarian Mathieu Thomas says the new additions are thanks to generous donations to an endowment fund, which allowed the library to purchase special books and the parchment which it otherwise couldn’t afford.

“When they arrived at the library it was like Christmas, opening boxes and seeing what was inside,” he said.

Illustrations like these valuable for teaching

The parchment fragment is one of the oldest documents preserved in a Montreal university. It’s written in Latin on animal skin and dates back to around the year 900, the time of Charlemagne.

It has been an exciting discovery for medieval studies professor Francis Gingras, who says pages of parchment manuscripts were used to bind newer books.

“They thought the text was not interesting. but that way we’ve kept some very old fragments of parchment like this one,” Gingras said, adding that researchers often look to match fragments together to understand the original manuscript.

“The fact that it’s in such good condition and you can really see the origin of our current script, the way we write,” said Thomas. “Even if the document is more than 1,000 years old you can still read them pretty easily.”

The library has also acquired several rare books, including an illuminated psalter from 13th-century France, along with other religious books, a book about politics from the 1400s, and nine volumes of the Anatomy of Man by Jean-Marc Bourgery from 1866, which contain around 750 colour lithographs of detailed anatomical illustrations.

Thomas says that before photography, precise illustrations like these were a valuable tool for teaching medicine, even if some are fairly gruesome to look at.

Useful for Montreal researchers, students

Both Thomas and Gingras say it’s essential that documents like these be housed in a library rather than a museum or private collection, because they can be properly preserved and are accessible to researchers, students, and even the general public.

“As a medievalist, I’ve travelled a lot to see these manuscripts, to see books like that, and to know that now Montreal can also welcome researchers doing the same work - it’s a form of pride,” said Gingras.

Thomas says that in the digital age, he finds that young students are often drawn to physical objects, with which they can interact up close.

“Some of them are like, I can’t wait to tell my parents that I touched a book from the 14th century, so that makes my day usually,” he said.

The library provides public tours of its collection once a month for those interested in getting close to history.