Researchers reveal Hidden texts in centuries-old Frisian law books — data available in 4TU.RESEARCHDAta repository

Full orig­i­nal arti­cle avail­able on the TU Delft web­site.

Researchers at TU Delft have used advanced imag­ing tech­niques to uncov­er cen­turies-old hid­den texts in Frisian man­u­scripts. These hand­writ­ten legal texts from the Mid­dle Ages orig­i­nate from the Richthofenkollek­sje, which is man­aged by Tre­soar in Leeuwar­den.

In two man­u­scripts, the Fivel­go man­u­script and the Codex Phaes­ma, some pages were glued togeth­er, mak­ing parts of the text vir­tu­al­ly unread­able for cen­turies. Thanks to an inno­v­a­tive com­bi­na­tion of the imag­ing tech­niques Reflectance Imag­ing Spec­troscopy (RIS) and Trans­mit­tance Imag­ing Spec­troscopy (TIS), researchers were able to make these hid­den lay­ers vis­i­ble. The results have been pub­lished in Nature — Her­itage Sci­ence and the dataset is avail­able with­in the 4TU.ResearchData repos­i­to­ry.

Assis­tant pro­fes­sor Matthias Alfeld explains how these tech­niques work: “RIS mea­sures the light reflect­ed from the sur­face of a page, reveal­ing what is vis­i­ble on the out­side. TIS, on the oth­er hand, mea­sures the light that pass­es through the mate­r­i­al, allow­ing hid­den or under­ly­ing lay­ers, such as text between glued pages, to become vis­i­ble.”

The revealed text in the Fivel­go man­u­script is a frag­ment from the Oldambt­ster Lan­drecht, a medieval Frisian legal text trans­lat­ed into Mid­dle Low Ger­man. This dis­cov­ery enhances the under­stand­ing of the legal and cul­tur­al his­to­ry of medieval Frisia, which also includ­ed the Groninger Omme­landen.

The full arti­cle is avail­able on the TU Delft web­site. The data used in the pub­li­ca­tion are avail­able with­in the 4TU.ResearchData repos­i­to­ry.