Students make new discoveries at Special Collections

In recent months, students from various Master's programmes have conducted research at the Special Collections of Utrecht University Library. This has yielded many new insights: about a medieval text that was scraped away, 17th-century printing blocks, sea navigation with a 17th-century ‘ruitkaart’, and traces of readers in almanacs from 1700-1900.

Scraped-away medieval text visible again

In July, four Master’s students completed their research on Hs. 1661, a 12th-century manuscript in which the older, underlying text has been scraped away (a palimpsest). Multispectral scanning allowed the underlying text to be partially made visible again. Anne Jaegers, Leon Kamermans, Marloes Neijens, and Teddy Scholten discovered that the underlying text is a sacramentarium, a manuscript used by a bishop as a kind of manual for liturgical acts. The original text comes from the eighth or ninth century. The results will be published in an open access article.

3D prints of 17th-century woodcuts

Ralph Zijlemans, Master’s student in art history, wrote his thesis on the collection of eighty 17th-century wooden printing blocks with Bible representations cut by Christoffel van Sichem II (c. 1581-1658). Among other things, he shows that the representations mainly copy 16th-century German Bible illustrations and he traces the many lives of the blocks, some of which continued to be reused until the 19th century. Working with art historians from the UU Digital Art Lab, he has experimented with making 3D scans and then a 3D print of one of the blocks to explore how reconstruction methods can enhance our understanding of the making process and thus contribute to the conservation of the blocks. Ralph is working on a paper on his findings.

The ‘ruitkaart’: navigating at sea without complicated calculations

Jasmijn den Hollander, Bachelor’s student in Mathematics, investigated how so-called ‘ruitkaarten’ (navigation worksheets) served as an aid for navigation at sea from the 17th century onwards. She identified four navigation worksheets and compared them, including the one from Utrecht University Library that was issued in 1658 by Abraham de Graaf and that is inserted at the end of P fol 188. The ‘ruitkaart’ was designed to facilitate triangulation at sea: sailors could use it to determine changes in latitude and longitude based on distance travelled and course. Jasmijn shows that the worksheet also had shortcomings. Precision left much to be desired because of the small scales, and measuring with strings and compasses often led to errors. Nevertheless, the instrument made it possible to solve navigational problems without complicated calculations. Read more in Jasmijn's thesis (in Dutch).

Readers’ traces in almanacs

Over 640 almanacs were examined from cover to cover by Ronan Maat, Master’s student in Literature Today, during a three-month internship in search of notes and other traces of historical readers. Almanacs were among the most widespread types of popular print in the early modern period, but who exactly read these yearly issued booklets and how were they used? Ronan found copies that are believed to have belonged to a jeweller, a music teacher, a seafarer, and someone in Friesland with a special interest in deaths, among others. Read more in Ronan's contribution on the Special Collections website.