Sunday, November 13, 2011

Missing medieval manuscript found after 50 years

In one otherwise unremarkable storage box in Connecticut College’s Shain Library, Ben Panciera made a remarkable discovery.

Wedged between a set of magazines containing stories for Australian children and a biography of an Episcopalian priest was a book Panciera never thought he’d see with his own eyes – a medieval manuscript presumed stolen more than 50 years earlier.

Panciera, the Director of Special Collections in the Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives, said the find was exhilarating. “You could see right away that it wasn’t paper,” Panciera said. “I thought, ‘Ahhhh, this has got to be at least 400 years old.’”

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net