[Sca-librarians] Medieval Manuscripts as Fossils-- article from Science

[Johnna Holloway]

For those interested in such things--
this came past my desk--
It's in the latest
Science, Vol 307, Issue 5713, 1208-1209 , 25 February 2005


    "How Science Survived"--Medieval Manuscripts as Fossils

Sharon Larimer Gilman and Florence Eliza Glaze

Ancient texts often survived from Antiquity through the Middle Ages in 
the form of copies made by dedicated monks before the arrival of the 
printing press in the 15th century A.D.; some of these texts are still 
in existence today. But how can we estimate the numbers of texts that 
survived or went extinct and consequently the amount of knowledge that 
we have inherited from the past? As biologist Gilman and historian Glaze 
<http://www.sciencemag.org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/cgi/content/full/307/5713/1208> 
discuss in their fascinating Perspective, a new study by Cisne 
<http://www.sciencemag.org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/cgi/content/short/307/5713/1305> 
helps to solve the problem by linking the paleodemography of ancient and 
medieval texts to population dynamics. By considering a series of extant 
medieval scientific manuscripts as "fossils" of early textual 
populations and applying models from population biology, Cisne 
calculates the size and age-distributions of certain scientific texts.

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The authors are in the Departments of Biology and History, Coastal 
Carolina University, Conway, SC 29528, USA.

Johnnae llyn Lewis