Richard III's prayer book goes online … and is that a personal note?

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The personal prayer book of King Richard III — in which the English king likely scrawled a reminder of his birthday in his own hand — is now available to peruse online.

 Leicester Cathedral digitized Richard III's "Book of Hours" and published it on the church's website alongside an interactive interpretive text. The original manuscript is in Lambeth Palace Library and is too fragile for public display, according to the dean of Leicester Cathedral, the Very Rev. David Monteith.

 Richard III , who died in battle in 1485, was interred in Leicester Cathedral in 2015 after his body was discovered beneath a city council parking lot in Leicester. Born in 1452, Richard ruled England for only about two years. He ascended the throne in 1483 amid a cloud of suspicion: He had been declared regent for his nephew, the son of King Edward IV (Richard's brother). But in the aftermath of Edward IV's death, the old king's marriage was declared invalid and his children illegitimate, which meant the crown became Richard's. His two nephews were never seen publically again, leading to rumors that Richard III had them murdered. The fate of the so-called "Princes in the Tower" remains a mystery to this day.

 The mystery of Richard III's nephews, along with Shakespeare's rather unflattering tragedy "Richard III," gave the king something of an unsavory reputation. But he was beloved in his adopted hometown of York during his life, and many modern admirers argue that Shakespeare's portrayal was slander. (The playwright was operating in the era of the Tudors, political enemies of Richard III and his dynasty, and would have had an incentive to paint the defeated king as evil.)

 The prayer book shows a softer, devoted side of Richard. Medieval laypeople kept personal books of hours with devotions that they were supposed to perform at certain times of day. Richard's "Book of Hours" was not originally made for him, according to a scholarly text by Anne Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs accompanying the Leicester digitization. There were, however, additions likely added at the king's request, as well as one notation that Richard III probably made himself.

 The first addition was a prayer called the Collect of St. Ninian, a missionary who converted England's Southern Picts to Christianity. Richard apparently had a special devotion to this saint, as he declared St. Ninian's feast day to be a principal one for his college at Middleham, Sutton and Visser-Fuchs wrote.

 Another addition, in the same script, was "The prayer of Richard III," a long devotional that is often mistakenly believed to be written for the king; in fact, Sutton and Visser-Fuchs wrote, it was a common prayer of the time, slightly edited to include Richard's name. After the prayer was a litany, which does appear unique to the king, Sutton and Visser-Fuchs wrote. The litany has not been found elsewhere, they wrote, and features a supplicant asking for God's mercy and protection. Unfortunately, Sutton and Visser-Fuchs wrote, much of the original litany is missing, making it difficult to glean much about Richard III's personal preoccupations from the text. There are references to protection from heathens, they wrote, suggesting Richard III's interest in the Crusades. 

King's handwriting

Perhaps the most fascinating page of the Book of Hours for those wanting to know the man behind the monarch is the calendar page for October. Most of the calendar is standard, with lists of saints' days and notations about the length of day and night. There are a few edits, like a note that someone named Thomas Howard died unexpectedly on March 28, and that someone else died on Aug. 25.

 On Oct. 2, though, there is a note in handwriting found nowhere else in the book. In a heavy, sprawling hand, the inscription reads, "hac die natus erat Ricardus Rex Anglie tertius Apud Foderingay Anno domini mlccccliio."

 Translation? "On this day was born Richard III King of England A.D. 1452." The note must have been written after the king's coronation on July 6, 1483, "and probably by the King himself," Sutton and Visser-Fuchs wrote.

The page with the king's probable handwriting is on sheet 7v of the manuscript and can also be found in Figure 28 of Sutton and Visser-Fuchs' text.

 Original article on Live Science .

Getting under the skin of a medieval mystery

Ancient Origins

A simple PVC eraser has helped an international team of scientists led by bioarchaeologists at the University of York to resolve the mystery surrounding the tissue-thin parchment used by medieval scribes to produce the first pocket Bibles.
Thousands of the Bibles were made in the 13th century, principally in France but also in England, Italy and Spain. But the origin of the parchment -- often called 'uterine vellum' -- has been a source of longstanding controversy.
Use of the Latin term abortivum in many sources has led some scholars to suggest that the skin of fetal calves was used to produce the vellum. Others have discounted that theory, arguing that it would not have been possible to sustain livestock herds if so much vellum was produced from fetal skins. Older scholarship even argued that unexpected alternatives such as rabbit or squirrel may have been used, while some medieval sources suggest that hides must have been split by hand through use of a lost technology.
A multi-disciplinary team of researchers, led by Dr Sarah Fiddyment and Professor Matthew Collins of the BioArCh research facility in the Department of Archaeology at York, developed a simple and objective technique using standard conservation treatments to identify the animal origin of parchment.
The non-invasive method is a variant on ZooMS (ZooArchaeology by Mass Spectrometry) peptide mass fingerprinting but extracts protein from the parchment surface simply by using electrostatic charge generated by gentle rubbing of a PVC eraser on the membrane surface.

Protein are extracted from the parchment simply by rubbing a PVC eraser on the membrane surface. Credit: Matthew Collins

The research, which is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), involved scientists and scholars from France, Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, the USA and the UK. They analysed 72 pocket Bibles originating in France, England and Italy, and 293 further parchment samples from the 13th century. The parchment samples ranged in thickness from 0.03 -- 0.28mm.
Dr Fiddyment said: "We found no evidence for the use of unexpected animals; however, we did identify the use of more than one mammal species in a single manuscript, consistent with the local availability of hides.

"Our results suggest that ultrafine vellum does not necessarily derive from the use of abortive or newborn animals with ultra-thin skin, but could equally reflect a production process that allowed the skins of maturing animals of several species to be rendered into vellum of equal quality and fineness."

Parchment or vellum was often made by stretching it on a wooden frame (public domain)

The research represents the first use of triboelectric extraction of protein from parchment. The method is non-invasive and requires no specialist equipment or storage. Samples can be collected without need to transport the artifacts -- researchers can sample when and where possible and analyse when required.
Bruce Holsinger, Professor of English and Medieval Studies at the University of Virginia and the initial humanities collaborator on the project, said: "The research team includes scholars and collaborators from over a dozen disciplines across the laboratory sciences, the humanities, the library and museum sciences--even a parchment maker. In addition to the discoveries we're making, what I find so exciting about this project is its potential to inspire new models for broad-based collaborative research across multiple paradigms. We think together, model together, write together."
Alexander Devine, of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, said: "The bibles produced on a vast scale throughout the 13th century established the contents and appearance of the Christian Bible familiar to us today. Their importance and influence stem directly from their format as portable one-volume books, made possible by the innovative combination of strategies of miniaturization and compression achieved through the use of extremely thin parchment. The discoveries of this innovative research therefore enhance our understanding of how these bibles were produced enormously, and by extension, illuminate our knowledge of one of the most significant text technologies in the histories of the Bible and of Western Christianity."

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Professor Collins added: "The level of access we have achieved highlights the importance of this technique. Without the eraser technique we could not have extracted proteins from so many parchment samples. Further, with no evidence of unexpected species, such as rabbit or squirrel, we believe that 'uterine vellum' was often an achievement of technological production using available resources."
Since finishing the work, parchment conservator Jií Vnouček, a co-author on the paper, has used this knowledge to recreate parchment similar to 'uterine vellum' from old skins. He said: "It is more a question of using the right parchment making technology than using uterine skin. Skins from younger animal are of course optimal for production of thin parchment but I can imagine that every skin was collected, nothing wasted."
Featured image: Manuscript of the ‘Book of Hours’ produced in Florence in the late 15th century. It is on uterine vellum. Credit: Rauner Special Collections Library.
By: Ancient-Origins