In 2025, our Rare Book and Manuscript Library acquired an extraordinarily rare manuscript fragment: a leaf from an administrative book made at one of the oldest medieval monasteries, the Abbey of St. Martin at Tours in Merovingian Gaul (France) and dating to the 7th century. It was later reinforced with a papyrus fragment from Egypt containing part of a poem on the life of St. Joseph, written in Coptic Greek and dating to the 6th or 7th centuries.
To help us understand this acquisition, a large crowd gathered on Friday afternoon, April 17th, to hear from Warren Brown (California Institute of Technology), a noted historian of early medieval Europe and its manuscript culture. Prof. Brown explained that our leaf was originally part of a working manuscript made and kept at the abbey, the other components of which (with one exception) are preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. Until now, it has not been the object of careful study since the 18th century. The very existence of this leaf, and its larger manuscript, calls into question longstanding assumptions about record-keeping and estate management in early medieval Europe, since it proves that at least some institutions were creating this kind of documentation well before the making of extant Carolingian polyptychs from the early 9th century. How and why the papyrus came to be at the abbey, and when it was attached to the back of the parchment leaf, remain questions to be answered.