He Kwakked It!

Top university professors were astounded after a manuscript held in the university’s Special Collections and Archives was found to be wrongly dated… by a century.

Gregorius’ ‘De cura pastorali’ was originally thought to originate from the 13th Century, although a visiting expert, all the way from the Netherlands, quickly found out the manuscript could actually be dated around 100 years earlier.

Complete with book worm holes and all, Gregorius’ book now dated to the 12th Century

Dr Erik Kwakkel from Leiden University visited Liverpool last month to give a talk to postgraduate students on Medieval manuscripts.

During his visit, not only did he find out Gregorious’ manuscript had been wrongly dated, but this revelation has made the manuscript the oldest in the university’s collection.

After examining the text in close detail, Kwakker was able to correctly identify the age of the manuscript.  He said:

““We can see that this book is a little bit older than thought. But what makes it more significant is that it still has its original bindings. These are extremely rare in the Middle Ages, particularly when we move back in time from the 13th Century to the 12th Century. This is the most important item here. When you have the binding, you can see what it looked like in the Middle Ages.”

Dr. Sarah Peverley, who organised the visit, recognised the importance of Kwakker’s work.  She said:

“The work Dr Kwakkel is doing with manuscripts is revolutionising our ways of thinking about them. His research on the ways in which the features of a medieval book can be tracked and recorded will allow scholars to date manuscripts more precisely and replace the intuitive judgements that palaeographers traditionally use with hard evidence.”

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