Rare books covered with seal skin hint at a medieval trade network

Science helps researchers resolve books by their covers — and revealing surprising beneficiaries of medieval trading routes in the technique.

Dozens of rare, fur-coated volumes from 12th and Thirteenth century French monasteries are wrapped with seal skins that may possibly bear scheme from as distant as Greenland, researchers anecdote April 9 in Royal Society Originate Science. The findings inform the belief that the books’ makers used simplest locally sourced affords and counsel that they had been a part of an intensive alternate network.

The books hail from Clairvaux Abbey, based in 1115 by Cistercian monks in northern France, and its daughter monasteries. Some tomes are only about 900 years extinct. Researchers had idea they had been wrapped with boar or deer skin. Nevertheless when book conservator Élodie Lévêque looked at them thru a microscope, she changed into as soon as stumped.

The critical covers had been obviously manufactured from sheepskin, nonetheless Lévêque struggled to title the skin used for the furry chemise — the outermost protective quilt. So she had scientists study proteins from chemise samples with identified animal proteins. It turns out that the skins belonged to seals.

“I changed into as soon as love, ‘that’s now not seemingly. There should be a mistake,’” says Lévêque, of Panthéon-Sorbonne College in Paris. Seals didn’t frequent France’s northern fly on the time, she says. “I despatched it as soon as more, and it came relieve as seal skin as soon as more.”

Comparing DNA from five chemises with DNA from seals confirmed that the covers had been certainly seal skin. Four of the chemises are genetically equivalent to harbor seals from Scandinavia, Denmark and Scotland, while the fifth chemise is genetically equivalent to harp seals, seemingly from Greenland or Iceland. The researchers visually identified other furry chemises and at last cataloged 43 seal-skin books.