Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln (face rubbed), in mitre and red cope, with crosier, seated on left speaks to a seated group of five people, mostly women. Tree on right; large bird with long beak at top.

Geneo

At the National Archives in The Hague, Jagersma was able to recover two documents that historians believed to be lost. These were the notebooks of Ericus Walten. These manuscripts had been confiscated by a court, the High Court of Holland, when Walten was arrested in 1694.

Benjamin Richler’s Guide to Hebrew Manuscript Collections is the basicreference work for navigating the different libraries and collections of He-brew manuscript collections

He filled the library at Vivarium with texts onthese subjects and transformed the production of manuscripts in hisscriptorium by developing proper standards and methods forcopying. As one of the few notable scholars of his period,Cassiodorus played a vital role in the survival of classical culture inItaly, saving books from the smoking ruins of Roman libraries,preserving and reproducing them

Theonly surviving manuscripts that were actually made in the ancientworld (before around AD 500) are small fragments of papyri found ona rubbish tip in Egypt and some scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri atHerculaneum.*1

Such was the opinion of Mark Pattison,who said, History cannot he written from manuscripts,which is as much as to say : " It is impossible fora man to write history from documents which heis obliged to put for himself into a condition inwhich they can be used."

How have chance survivals shaped literary and linguistic canons? How might the topography of the field appear differently had certain prized unica not survived? What are the ways in which authors, compilers, scribes, and scholars have dealt with lacunary exemplaria? How do longstanding and emergent methodologies and disciplines—analysis of catalogs of dispersed libraries, reverse engineering of ur-texts and lost prototypes, digital reconstructions of codices dispersi, digital humanities. and cultural heritage preservation, and trauma studies to name a few,—serve to reveal the extent of disappearance? How can ideologically-driven biblioclasm or the destruction wrought by armed conflicts -- sometimes occurring within living memory -- be assessed objectively yet serve as the basis for protection of cultural heritage in the present? In all cases, losses are not solely material: they can be psychological, social, digital, linguistic, spiritual, professional. Is mournful resignation the only response to these gaps, or can such sentiments be harnessed to further knowledge, understanding, and preservation moving forward?

“The margins are full of images of disembodied body parts, plants, animals, even portraits of cross-eyed kings, which relate to the main body of text and act as a mnemonic for the reader,” Greene says. “Even though you open the manuscript knowing it is a medical text designed for practical use, nothing quite prepares you for seeing a disembodied leg, posterior, or penis pointing at salient parts of the text!”

But the fact that so many patrons did not balk at the expense implies that many people considered these ridiculous monstrosities to be desirable, even valuable.  In the last 30 years or so, significant efforts have been made to understand marginalia in its proper context; there are many theories about its function and purpose (see for example Lillian Randall's Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts or Michael Camille's Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art).

Criticism of these kinds of images is nearly as old as the images themselves.  The most famous (and freqently cited) is that of Bernard of Clairvaux, who asked: 'What excuse can there be for these ridiculous monstrosities...? One could spend the whole day gazing fascinated at these things, one by one, instead of meditating on the law of God. Good Lord, even if the foolishness of it all occasion no shame, at least one might balk at the expense.' (Bernard of Clairvaux, Excerpts from the Apologia to Abbot William of St-Thierry, VII.30; see here for more). 

side from hunting scenes, one may broadly divide ancient depictions of hares into two iconographical groups. In the first group, the hare embodies the love of a man for a woman. On numerous Greek vases, for example, we see a depiction of Eros, the God of Love, with his two symbols, the lyre and the hare; other scenes show Eros pursuing a hare as a symbol of love, which, as we know from Book 1 of Philostrates’ Imagines, has been given a special gift: fertility.