Research Spotlight

As she pored over a medieval manuscript last summer, Taylor Tunstall, C’25, found herself faced with something unexpected: a centuries-old mistake embedded in the margins of the text. Though just a single word, it would end up deepening her perspective not only on what it means to engage with ancient works, but also where she fits in with the long line of people who have kept them alive throughout history.

An English and Latin double major, Tunstall had committed to an intensive, six-week summer research project with Professor and Chair of English and Creative Writing Matthew Irvin. The project focused on Latin paleography, or the reading and study of medieval manuscript writing in Latin. Using a variety of digital manuscripts ranging from late Roman papyrus to 15th-century deluxe vellum books, Tunstall and Irvin worked to decipher scribes’ abbreviations and marginalia.

“There are a couple of different layers to it,” says Tunstall. “First, you have to decode the script and figure out what it says in Latin. Then, you have to determine what that means in English.” 

The complicating factors when pursuing those two goals are many. The age of these manuscripts means that they were typically written in an ornate lettering that differs greatly from the script used today; hence, the necessary first step of “decoding” the Latin when examining a text. As Tunstall and Irvin were attending particularly to the manuscripts’ glosses—brief annotations or translations added to the text’s margins—they also had to track the work of multiple scribes across a single manuscript, comparing each one’s motivations and idiosyncrasies.

Tunstall’s summer research activity culminated in a final project transcribing Horace’s Ode 1.37 from Bodleian Library MS. D'Orville 158, f.11r-11v. Tunstall and Irvin determined that the 11th-century manuscript was likely organized for teaching, with difficult or interesting words carefully glossed with synonyms and contextual explanations carefully written in the margins.

It was among those glosses that Tunstall found a surprise: a mistranslation of the Latin word pulvinaria. The overall context of the manuscript indicated that the word should refer to a certain couch used in ancient Roman religious rituals. Yet the scribe, likely unaware of that meaning, translated it using a Latin word to mean “table”—therefore subtly, but distinctly, altering the meaning of the text to its 11th-century reader.

With just one word, translated by a scribe 900 years ago and originally written by Horace over 1,100 years before that, Tunstall found herself with a new perspective on her place in the long chain of people who have worked throughout history to allow these ancient texts to survive to modernity. In a succession of eras predating simple photocopying, an original manuscript needed transcription—with all its attendant glosses—followed by translation, and the process then needed to repeat through generations and across cultures.

Each iteration of that process added new layers to the text in question, resulting in an ever-widening arena for analysis and discovery. And after writing up their findings, Tunstall and Irvin have claimed their place in a conversation that now spans millennia.

“Working on medieval manuscripts gave me a deeper appreciation for the rich history embedded in each text and for the vital role paleography plays in preserving these works,” says Tunstall. “It was a joy to explore and speculate on how scribes engaged with the works they were copying and glossing centuries ago.”