Today, English is learned as a second language all over the world but, during the Middle Ages, it had little international significance.
“Another possible explanation might be found in the limited prestige of the English language during this period.
But heroic stories in English rarely appear in the library catalogues of monasteries and friaries in the first place. We might blame the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, which did scatter many libraries. By contrast to what the authors saw for Icelandic and Irish works, the vaster medieval French literature had a low survival rate for works, which the authors attribute to many of its works being low in abundance (lacking evenness), rendering them more susceptible to immaterial loss.įorgotten Books - Science (2022) from Forgotten Books on Vimeo.ĭaniel Sawyer, the Fitzjames Research Fellow in Medieval English Literature at Merton College, Oxford, and another member of the research team, notes, “We found notably low estimated survival rates for medieval fiction in English. Evenness, say the authors, mirrors a special feature of islands as studied by ecologists: the endemic species richness is higher on islands than on the mainland. Additional analyses revealed something about these island literatures that has been overlooked in historical discussions of the survival of historic literature namely, that they had a higher “evenness” – or more even distribution of copies for a given work – which helps create stability in the face of disasters like library fires.
Further to the authors’ surprise, works for two of the more insular island cultures, Icelandic and Irish, were relatively intact, with survival rates of 77.3% and 81.0%, respectively. With respect to works, they estimate that about 68% survived, though they did observe considerable inter-vernacular variation, such as the relatively poorly surviving English works (38.6%). The 3,648 medieval documents in the six vernaculars that are still observable today constitute a sample from a population that originally would have counted 40,614 specimens, they say. The authors note some of their observations have not been noticed before and challenge existing assumptions. This approach enabled them to estimate the size of the original population of works and of documents, respectively, as well as the losses that these cultural domains sustained, across six vernaculars (Dutch, French, Icelandic, Irish, English, and German). Mike Kestemont, professor of computational humanities at the University of Antwerp and one of the lead authors of the study, says, “We suspected ecologists’ statistical methods to predict numbers of rare species could also be used to estimate numbers of lost literary works and we were right.” Heatmap of the geolocations of the libraries and archives where documents are kept for four vernaculars The team also calculated the survival rates for six medieval language areas separately and observed that there are huge differences in these survival rates within Europe.
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