Invisible etchings, mysterious letters, and even doodles can be found in centuries-old books, manuscripts, and printing plates. These objects are being brought to light by a new technology that maps their surface.
A woman leaned over a valuable book around 1,300 years ago and etched some letters and cartoonish drawings into the margin. She didn’t use ink; instead, she scratched them in, making them almost invisible to the naked eye.
Nobody knew they were there until last year.
The 8th-century book, a copy of the Act of Apostles from the Christian New Testament, is now housed in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. Researchers had suspected for some time that the religious text was likely owned by a woman, but they didn’t know who.
Jessica Hodgkinson, a researcher at the University of Leicester, decided to take a closer look in 2022 and was surprised to discover a hidden etching on page 18. Just below the Latin text.
It looked like this when digitally highlighted:
The letters read: “EaDBURG BIRE C….N,” with the last word missing. What does it all mean?
Hodgkinson deduced that the first symbol was a cross, followed by “Eadburg,” which was almost certainly the owner’s name. Further examination revealed that it had been deliberately scratched with a stylus into four other pages.
Little is known about her, but Hodgkinson and colleagues believe she was a nun – the abbess of a religious community in Minster-in-Thanet, Kent, England.
The following letters were a little more enigmatic: could it be “bears cwaertern,” the Old English word for “prison”? The Latin passage it is accompanied by describes the imprisonment of the Apostles, so Eadburg may have drawn a parallel with her own situation.
Even more intriguing, Hodgkinson and colleagues discovered small drawings of people on other pages. A square figure with outstretched arms in one margin – could it be a nun? (See top-left image below). In another, a person raises their hand to a glum companion’s face (bottom-right). “Talk to the hand” in the eighth century? Their significance is unknown.
The marginalia found inside the Eadburg book are not the only examples of hidden writing and drawing found in Oxford in recent months. Hodgkinson was able to see Eadburg’s etchings thanks to the Bodleian Library’s new imaging technology, which can map the physical texture and contours of a book page, manuscript, or the surface of other historical objects such as printing plates. Fine-tuning this reveals features that would otherwise be invisible to the naked eye or standard cameras.
“The surface itself contains a vast amount of information,” says Adam Lowe, founder of the Factum Foundation in Madrid, a non-profit that developed the technology for the Bodleian as part of the Archiox project (Analysing and Recording Cultural Heritage in Oxford). “The more you can make that visible, the more truly exciting discoveries will emerge.”
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The Archiox researchers create digital representations of pages and objects using two devices: the “Selene,” which has four cameras capable of capturing differences in surface relief down to 25 micrometres (0.025mm/0.001in), and the “Lucida,” which uses lasers and two tiny cameras to create 3D scans.
“Everything is measurable; this is more than just an imaging tool; it is also a measurement tool. And that adds to the excitement “says John Barrett, senior photographer at the Bodleian and Archiox technical lead.
The technology is now being used in the basement of the Bodleian to create digital representations of various items in the library collection.
The Eadburg book was not the only ancient document that revealed hidden etchings.
In this manuscript from the ninth century, The Archiox researchers scratched a hunting scene into the surface: Why would people etch their names and add drawings like this, almost invisibly?
The names could simply have been used to demonstrate ownership without scribbling all over a valuable religious text. “These manuscripts were regarded as sacred. And, while you wanted to leave your mark on them, you didn’t want to be too obvious “Barrett elaborates.
“I don’t think it was necessarily just doodling for the sake of doodling,” he says of the pictures. “With these annotations, especially those I’ve recorded recently, they almost always have a relationship to the text itself.”
Copper plates
The Rawlinson collection of 200-to-300-year-old copper printing plates was chosen by Alexandra Franklin, co-ordinator of the Centre for the Study of the Book, and Chiara Betti, a PhD student at the University of London, as one of the first items in the Bodleian’s collection to be scanned for the Archiox project.
In this case, the Archiox technology revealed a previously hidden etching on the back of a plate. It depicts an influential French cardinal on the front, but when researchers looked at the back, they noticed faint musical staves: “It was probably inspired by Psalm 9, because the words seem to fit,” Barrett says. “I will praise you, O Lord, with my whole heart,” says Psalm 9 in the new King James version of the Bible. I will tell of all your wonderful works; I will rejoice and be glad in You; I will sing praise to Your name, O Most High.”
Why would someone do something like this? “The [copper] material itself was very valuable,” Barrett explains. “It could have been re-used, or it could simply have been an opportunity for the artist or engraver to practise.”
However, as he points out, no known print of this music from the plate exists, so discovering it added a new item to the historical record. “The catalogue reference for this plate does not indicate this. These are completely novel discoveries “Barrett explains. “I’d say that about a third of the plates I’ve imaged for Archiox had something on the back as well. The designs are frequently stunning, strange, or mysterious.”