“Science”
Medieval medicine isn’t known for being particularly scientific.
It was mostly humorous.
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Who has time to make vellum/parchment/paper/etc. anyway?
So complicated. Takes so long. Getting the materials together for a rush job is impossible.
What’s already on the shelf here besides a cure for cancer, an effective nerve tonic, a good immune system booster that we can scrape off and reuse for propaganda?
Over the years I have been morbidly fascinated by books/movies alluding to the trove of information treasures lost forever in the burning of the ancient library at Alexandria, the coup of the Incan empire, the collapse of civilization at Songhai etc. Maybe I saw something in a book by Dan Brown (I’ll read nearly anything if I am bored enough at the airport) mentioning ancient looted texts and treasures of the Catholic Church’s subjugated then eradicated cultures, all locked away in some catacomb probably underneath the Vatican or something.
Humans are really good at epic destruction of and failures of institutional and culture memory, then reinventing the wheel. And then profiting by that, monetizing it.
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“A pun at maturity is fully groan.”
–meme from interwebs
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Well, it’s unlikely a shopping list would have been put on vellum in the first place. But then, maybe that’s also unfortunate…shopping lists from hundreds of years ago would provide some really interesting insights into how people at the time lived. In some ways, they could be even more valuable than obsolete scientific texts or the 5038th iteration of “love thy neighbor”.
Your analogy doesn’t really work because you’re comparing the experiences of one human being on the order of days, months, years to the experiences of many human beings trying to understand things over the course of centuries. This is the key:
No one living remembers Galen’s failures because no one living was alive when Galen worked. The only memory we have of Galen’s failures and successes are these written works.
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The Archimedes palimpsest is very interesting:
It shows how Archimedes used a rudimentary form of calculus millennia before it was officially discovered.
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And how is that Galen’s work is deemed more valuable to the human condition and experience than mine?
Maybe in 1000 years your work will be even more important than his. Rome wasn’t built in a day!
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Mark it down. In 1000 years that treasured manuscript “DONT EAT THIS AT HOME” will be a marveled wonder for its contributions to human civilization.
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The effaced document is still of historical interest. The “superstitious monks erase scientific knowledge in favor of their god” narrative isn’t that interesting.
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Making parchment and binding it into a book was a huge undertaking, involving hundreds (thousands?) of hours of labour. It made perfect sense to repurpose books that your monastery’s library deemed discardable by scraping off the old text and putting down new text.
The people who repurposed texts like this were not setting out to destroy irreplacable documents. They had a book they didn’t want or need, and needed a book they didn’t have, so they scraped off the first to make the second. If you could travel back in time to ask them “what about the text you’re erasing,” they would have said that they’d never destroy the last copy in the world of a book. Any more than a modern library would think that they were destroying irreplacable knowledge when they decide to discard a ratty old book in the recycle bin. It’s just that the number of copies in existence back before the printing press was so low that books became lost forever far more readily.
Blaming the scribes who repurposed documents is really missing the point badly, as is casting this as a religion vs science thing. Everybody scraped off manuscripts back then. Old versions of religious texts were scraped off to make way for legal treatises. Old legal treatises were scraped off to make way for account ledgers. Old account ledgers were scraped to make way for masterpieces of literature, and so on until the parchment became too thin and ratty to reuse any more. And scholars are always happy to discover the underlayer even when it turns out to be something mundane, because so few documents from the pre printing press era survived, so even an account ledger or Yet Another Copy of the New Testament can yield interesting insights.
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These days you don’t need a particle accelerator to see superstition over-writing science.
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I would hazard a guess that the library in question already had a copy, and so one of them was deemed recyclable. Parchment was expensive.
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Squirrel skin does.
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It’s an interesting moral question: is your life more valuable than another irreplaceable thing? To you it is, and to many people it is. To others it isn’t. Is it OK to turn the last white rhinos into stew if you’re starving to death? You probably think so, but society hired people who would kill you if you tried.
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This. Libraries continue to do this via the process of deaccessioning, but unless the codex itself is particularly valuable, they sell it for next to nothing, and if it doesn’t sell they just toss it (or recycle it). To me this just falls under “what libraries do”.
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Galen, like Hippocrates before him, was primarily a philosopher, and his lost works would shed considerable light on the history of science and how the scientific method ultimately emerged. Their ideas were shaped by their own supernatural beliefs, but most science and proto-science in human history was undertaken in hopes of revealing the divine.
You’re too caught up in the utility of the text, when the moral issue is the motivation behind overwriting files. Is it OK to wipe a hard drive with the only known copy of, say, Stephen Hawking’s computerized utterances in order to save a backup copy of the Pope’s TED talk? The dilemma gets interesting quickly.
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I concur fully. but this is why the content matters, not just context. If the Hawking utterances were him discussing his bucket list items of food to eat and the Pope Ted talk was the current Pope who has shown himself to be far more forward and progressive thinking than previous ones…Yes, erase the former and give me the later.
I can find myself being ok with either situation, my point from the get go was simply that I need more info on the content to understand the context.
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Reminds me of ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz’! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz
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I think people forget this… it’s entirely true, right up through the enlightenment. Let’s not forget that in addition to writing great works on mathematics and defining gravity for us, Sir Isaac Newton was also an avid alchemist and was obsessed with biblical numerology. It certainly doesn’t invalidate the work he did on physics, but his work also wasn’t just science for science sake - it was to uncover the reality of god’s creation.
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Back when I was in grad school and still regularly working on the history half, I got a chance to examine some of the very high (for the time) resolution images of the Novgorod birchbark papers and the wax tablets from the same era. The wax tablets were intended to be erased; they were the pocket notebook of the time. The tablets were a pair of hinged wood frames with the voids filled with wax. You carved into the wax with a stylus; when you were done with those jottings, you warmed the wax and smashed everything flat with your thumb. Thus, hundreds or thousands of jottings made faint impressions on the wood backing, which can be deciphered now with much effort, imaging and computational work.
Which made me think a lot about palimpsest over the years. The people who scraped pages knew what they were doing. They understood it better than I do, because they worked with parchment all the time, and I’m pretty sure they realized at the time that no scraping was perfect. If you’ve ever touched an actual parchment document, you understand that parchment ink is between paint and dye. It’s mostly on the surface of the parchment (like paint) but depending on which ink recipe, some discolors the parchment. Scraping it all off usually means de-surfacing the top layer of the parchment, which makes it suede-like, and also makes the subsequent writing harder. On the other side, if the original ink maker didn’t get the recipe right, the ink started flaking off the parchment soon after it dried, which also explains why palimpsest was so common.
But these people weren’t dumb. They knew that a scrape was imperfect and I’ll bet a nice lunch that at least some realized that palimpsest was a way to save and hide documents. This would especially be true in cultures with lower literacy amongst the rulers, and power struggles between ruling class and clerical class, or in the case of pending schisms.
Not saying all, not even most. I think most of the time, palimpsest exists because parchment was expensive and sometimes the writing decayed while the parchment was still good, or the library already had good copies (or had made a better copy of a flaking one). And the better copy has since been lost. But I think from time to time, palimpsest could be subversive.
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