Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury, was hacked to death in Canterbury Cathedral 850 years ago and has been studied ever since, so it was generally assumed that everything that could be known about him was already explored.
Updated on the 5th of April, 2019 with information from Alin Suciu’s Coptic Literature and Manuscripts
If want to buy only one book on the practical history of the Medieval bookbinding, that has to be The Archaeology of Medieval Bookbinding by Janos Alexander Szirmai. And here is the good news: book was just reprinted by the Routledge academic publishing house. What’s even better, this time you can choose from hardcover, paperback or digital edition of the book!
For quite a long time writing materials were a very expensive thing. It is not surprising that Mediaeval scholars were looking for some ways to cut the costs or recycle the materials. That’s how palimpsests were introduced. Often the old not-so-important texts were scraped or washed off from the leather (or papyrus) pages to allow for the new texts to be written over. This time the unimportant text of the medical recipe book attributed to Hippocrates was replaced by a layer of Bible text known as the “Sinaitic manuscript”.
