Word: manuscript
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...14th century theme, the mass was his own invention. He had composed it in his spare time, and, partly in playfulness and partly for fear he would never get it performed otherwise, had decided to give it at least a nominal touch of antiquity. He had come across a manuscript by Etienne Moulinié and liked the name-and after all, Moulinié's initials were the same as his own. After the first performance in the fall of 1950, the critics had jumped for joy, and he was stuck. Said he: "What could...
...just a routine chore that young (29) Mathematician Derek Price intended to do in the Peterhouse Library at the University of Cambridge. All he wanted was a look at a certain 14th century manuscript in connection with a history he was writing on scientific instruments. But as soon as the manuscript was brought to him one day last December, Price felt his pulse begin to quicken. By last week, medievalists all over Britain were talking about the mystery unearthed by Price: Who was the author...
According to the Cambridge catalogue, MS. 75 was supposed to be a treatise on the astrolabe (forebear of the sextant) by an astronomer named Simon Bredon. But, in all the 400-odd years the manuscript had been on the Peterhouse shelves, apparently no one had ever bothered to examine it carefully. The astronomical tables it contained were dated 1391 to 1393. Yet, as Derek Price well knew, Bredon had died...
...Furthermore, instead of being written in scholarly Latin, part of the manuscript was in a clumsy sort of code based on a complex series of substitutions (A for V, B for 4, C for 7, etc.) which could easily be translated into early English. Price also found that MS. 75 was not a treatise on the astrolabe at all, but a description of how to build an obscure instrument called an "Equatorie of the Planetis." As far as Price remembered, only one example of such an instrument still exists-at Merton College, Oxford...
Price had no trouble persuading other scholars to look at the manuscript. And one day, when he and his supervisor, A. R. Hall, were examining it, they discovered some notations hidden under the binding. "Good Lord!" Hall exclaimed. "Do you see what I see?" Sure enough, there in the margin was the name Chaucer...