Those concerned with studying when and where historic writings were produced typically look to the sources themselves for information, analyzing features like handwriting and dialect. But one professor of English has started looking at the parchment on which old texts were written in a more literal way.
Timothy Stinson, assistant professor of English with a post-doctorate from Johns Hopkins University, has started using DNA testing on medieval manuscripts, which are written on animal skins, to date them and evaluate where they were written.
Because literary manuscripts typically are not “dated and dateable,” unlike official documents, Stinson said, determining where in time they come from can pose difficulties.
Literary researchers often approach the question of “How old is this document?” by examining the text itself. According to Stinson, typical tools used to localize texts are dialect and handwriting analysis.
“If I bring in three people and one of them is from Appalachian, North Carolina, one of them is from Texas, one of them is from Brooklyn, you can get it right 100 percent of the time [based on their accents],” Stinson said. “Before standardized spelling came to be, everyone would write in a way that reflected their accents…. You can look at something and tell if someone’s from Kent or Yorkshire and so on.”
Handwriting, he says, works the same way. Handwriting and dialect analysis, however, are not often completely dependable. So, frustrated with non-reliable research methods, Stinson sought a better way.
For a long time, Stinson said, the main parchment used was animal skin, primarily sheep and goat calves. The animal depended on where the writer lived. For instance, a writer from England would use sheepskin.
It occurred to him that researchers in fields such as animal science may look more at the animal skin of the parchment itself, and the DNA in these skins might provide an interdisciplinary approach to localize and temporalize medieval manuscripts. Stinson started by asking his biologist brother if the DNA in the parchment had likely survived, a question to which he received a reassuring “yes.”
Research and Innovation Seed Funding provided money for a project between researchers in animal science, English, paleontology, earth and atmosphere, and mathematics, that would help historians to extract this DNA. This team of five researchers started by testing on medieval samples, which are surprisingly easy to come by, according to Stinson.
The team focused on making tests that were non-destructive, or that leave no evidence to the naked eye that a sample has been taken, because of the value of the parchment with which they hoped to eventually work with. After running a series of destructive tests on the first samples, Stinson’s team made parchment out of two stillborn cows to test and practice, so as not to damage 600-year-old artifacts.
To write on the skin, someone must soak it in limewater, allow it to stretch and scrape the hair from the flesh. “We would practice on these guys and then go back and test it on the medieval parchment,” Stinson said. “It would give us a sense of which techniques worked on both, or which worked only on the new.”
While the project has not yielded much information on dating and localizing, it has offered valuable information for other disciplines involved in the research. “[Dating and localizing] is going to take a while, we’re going to have to build a database. But there is a whole history here of animal husbandry, selective breeding, trade practices.”
In terms of literary discoveries, Stinson said he is still a number of steps away and must first focus on developing and refining techniques. “If we could get these techniques refined, people could begin to record this data. In the future, scholars can use this to contextualize their data.”
