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Contents - Winter 2009

Vol. 2 No. 1

Scattered Leaves: Gathering the Pieces of a Medieval Manuscript

Click here to watch a video interview with Prof. Stoicheff on the Ege project.

By Bronwyn Eyre

Missing medieval manuscripts, French monasteries, a “strange, eccentric book-tearer.” Throw in a contemporary sleuthing effort, and it starts to sound like a literary mystery by A.S. Byatt.

“Scattered Leaves,” however, is an international academic project headed by Peter Stoicheff, University of Saskatchewan English professor and U of S Vice-Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts. His intention is to locate, and digitally reassemble, the disparate parts of a medieval treasure of books once owned by Otto Ege (pronounced “egg-ee”)—an early-20th century American book collector and former dean of the Cleveland Institute of Art.

“It’s very difficult to find some of these scattered pages,” Stoicheff says. “Many are framed on people’s walls, in personal collections, or in little bookstores.”

For eight years, Stoicheff has been tracking the whereabouts of hundreds of handwritten manuscript pages that Ege cut out from 40 medieval books, placed in boxes of 50 each, and sold. In the mid-1950s, the U of S purchased one of these boxes for $750; the value of the contents have appreciated to a current worth of roughly $200,000.

In 2000, Stoicheff and colleague Andrew Taylor of the University of Ottawa discovered the box of Ege manuscripts in the U of S Library’s Department of Special Collections and hit on the idea of finding as many of Ege’s 39 other boxes as possible. By canvassing libraries and private collections across North America, they have so far located 33.

Ege—who, in most cases, removed the most generic pages and kept the best for himself—once said that his purpose in removing the pages and selling them (a common practice among book collectors at the start of the 20th century) was democratically educational: “Few people can hope to own a complete manuscript book. Hundreds, however, may own a leaf.”

All the manuscripts in question are religious in subject—mainly Biblical and liturgical texts, as well as hymnals—dating from the 12th to 16th centuries. They were written by hand on parchment and vellum (the prepared skin of sheep and calves). Powdered gold or gold leaf was applied to textual highlight. Then paint made from plants and minerals was added and allowed to dry before the next colour was applied.

When he first came upon the manuscripts, Stoicheff says it was “extremely moving to hold a page that was created only through, in many cases, hundreds of hours of collective human labour, with different people having different jobs that added to the final appearance of the page.”

Normally value, he says, “is in their historic materiality—as well as what Ege did to them and the fact that most have been privately owned. They aren’t like a first edition of Chaucer or something. They don’t have literary value per se.”

The beautiful Beauvais Missal is the exception— “a one and first of a kind,” Stoicheff calls it, and valuable both financially and academically. The Missal (a book containing the Catholic mass throughout the year) was created in the Beauvais monastery north of Paris in 1485, and represents French Gothic illumination at its most refined. Stoicheff located additional pages of the Missal earlier this year after he was contacted by a couple who found out about the “Scattered Leaves” project and wondered if a number of medieval pages they owned, which had been passed down through their family, might be part of the Ege collection. As it happened, the pages were from one of the remaining seven of Ege’s boxes that Stoicheff hadn’t yet found. “That was exciting and fruitful for us,” he says.



The “scattered,” search-driven aspect of the project has attracted considerable public attention. Sessions at a 2000 conference, “Remaking the Book,” for example (which featured Barbara Shailor, former Director of Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, as well as experts in medieval texts and manuscript production and representatives from libraries across North America where Ege boxes have been found), were jam-packed, mainly by members of the public.

“It’s an example of how people can become involved in an academic project like this, simply by reading about it in the media, consulting our website and even assisting us in locating lost pages,” Stoicheff says.

In 2005, The Globe and Mail ran a feature, “Lost, 40 boxes of ancient text. Found, 33.” The project has also been covered in The StarPhoenix, on CBC Radio’s Sounds like Canada, and on History Television.

To date, in concert with scholars in both Canada and the U.S., Stoicheff—with the assistance of graduate student Jon Bath in the U of S Humanities and Fine Arts Digital Research Centre—has assembled digital photographs of the contents of all 33 boxes, including the Beauvais Missal. The plan now is to reconstruct them into complete, digitized books, the pages of which viewers can “turn.”

Digitizing the Ege manuscript pages, Stoicheff says, gets the word out about how beautiful different kinds of medieval manuscripts are: “You read these pages not just in terms of the information they yield, but for the experience of looking at the page,” he says. “And hardly any part of a medieval page was left blank. That’s not unlike contemporary web pages, which are very visually, iconically based.”

Click here for more information about the U of S Ege project.