W dniu 9 stycznia 2025 roku o godzinie 12:30 w Audytorium Aleksandra Jabłońskiego prof. dr hab. Piotr Targowski (Instytut Fizyki UMK) wygłosi wykład pt. A runaway princess or the Elbląg library mystery.
This story begins in the C. K. Norwid City library in Elbląg, where the researcher from the Institute for the History of Science, PAS discovered a late 16c book partially damaged by water and thus with a visible piece of parchment enforcing the connection between the front cover and the content pages. This piece turned out to be much more interesting than the book itself and was identified as a fragment from an 11th-century psalter originating in England.
The lecture will be composed of two parts: in the first, I will talk about the history of the book from which this fragment (and several others discovered later) was determined to come. Then, I will say more about the fragments, including the hypothesis about the identification of the owner: a “runaway princess”. In the second, I will talk about the results of a non-invasive physical and chemical analysis of manuscript fragments. The fragments match other membra disiecta from the same codex dispersed throughout Europe. By gathering detailed information on the material features of the fragments, in particular, the ruling method (OCT) and the elemental composition of the inks (XRF, LA-ICP-MS) and pigments (XRF, FTIR, XRD, Raman), the analysis sought to provide further insight into the production process, the manuscript’s dating, and possibly the origin of the ink (MC-ICP-MS). The overarching goal was to contextualize the Elbląg fragments within the broader framework of manuscript production and use. All this will give an opportunity to present a new emerging research discipline named fragmentology - an autonomous branch of manuscript studies that focuses on the recovered fragments, traces their origin and provenance, and examines the context from which they derive.
Organizatorem Kolokwium Czwartkowego jest Instytut Fizyki UMK w Toruniu.