Word: manuscripts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
...Europe, as in the U.S., Hamsun went hungry. One day he walked into the Copenhagen office of Editor Edvard Brandes, who later wrote "I have seldom seen a man more derelict in appearance. But that face! . . . The expression on his quivering pale face haunted me." The manuscript Hamsun gave Brandes was the story of a writer starving to death in a big city. Published as Hunger it brought Hamsun world recognition. Other novels followed. They were written in a simple, austere, almost laconic style, but with passages of high lyricism and great narrative power. European critics found...