More big medieval manuscript news!

We've had a recent post about the discovery of new Gothic manuscript material (here), a palimpsest, where earlier (Gothic) writing had been removed and new (Latin) writing done on the same surface, apparently found by Chiara Faraggiana di Sarzana from Bologna University.* Now we have a pretty cool bit of news from medievalists.net about how multispectral imaging is allowing the discovery of new writing, here (and image from there as well).

I'm not sure that these manuscripts are particularly interesting linguistically, but this has huge ramifications for people working with poorly attested medieval languages. I think those folks all assume that a lot more early medieval text exists than is current known and it doesn't take much to shake up the corpus for some of those languages.

*Recall that the new Gothic stuff was discovered in Bologna ... it's a happening place right now, I guess.

Emmett Bennett and Linear B

I found out yesterday that Emmett Bennett passed away two weeks ago here in Madison. He was an emeritus professor of Classics, where he taught for almost 30 years. As the NYT obit linked above describes, he played a key role in deciphering the early Greek texts in the script called Linear B, one of the amazing stories of philology. Unfortunately, I don't know the story well enough to tell any more than it's told in the obit or the sketch here. (I'll dig a little to see if I can find out more.)

You can see some of his documents here, including tables of symbols he worked out. You may think that a Classics prof working on ancient clay tablets wouldn't be too cutting edge, but he was using punch cards back in the 1940s, held a patent (it looks like), and worked to figure out ancient bookkeeping.

For now, it's another reminder of the Wisconsin tradition, not only in ancient languages but also in the use of new technologies and the value of thinking broadly.

Image from here, the first page of a piece in the American Journal of Archeology from 1950.