Using techniques that are more commonly used to track foxes and other wildlife, researchers are trying to figure out just how much medieval literature has been lost over time.
Ask any Dutch schoolchild about Reynard the fox, and they’ll tell you all about the adventures of the dashing, anthropomorphic folk hero, whose exploits were laid down in the 13th century by Willem die Madoc maecte, or “William who made the Madoc.” Madoc is likely the name of another once-popular poem about a legendary Welsh knight and explorer. Despite being the well-known medieval author’s calling card, nobody knows the content of that poem, which has been lost to time.
During Europe’s medieval period, which stretches from roughly the beginning of the sixth century to the end of the 15th, narrative fiction took off in a big way. Authors penned chivalric romances and heroic tales of knights battling fantastic monsters and traveling to exotic lands—think, Beowulf and King Arthur—by hand onto parchment and eventually paper codices. “You can liken these to action hero movies nowadays,” Kestemont says.
To estimate how much medieval literature once existed, book historians compare ancient book catalogs, which are incomplete, with the number and scope of surviving texts. To offer another, perhaps more informative, estimate of how much literature once existed, Kestemont and colleagues borrowed a technique from ecology called the “unseen species” model.
The researchers turned to lists of surviving medieval texts—and those suspected to have been lost—written between 600 and 1450 C.E. in Dutch, French, Icelandic, Irish, English, and German. There were 3648 texts in total. When they ran those numbers through the unseen species model, the algorithm suggested. That’s rather close to traditional estimates of 7%.
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