Study finds 90 percent of medieval chivalric and heroic manuscripts have been lost

An ecological model has been applied to estimate the number of lost medieval manuscripts in Europe.

Those who study human culture must grapple with what amounts to an incomplete data set, since researchers are limited to poring over the books, manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, and other artifacts that have survived to learn about a given period. We call this predicament "survivorship bias," and it can lead to underestimations of just how diverse a society might have been in terms of the cultural materials produced. Teasing out how much of a cultural domain may have been lost is a considerable challenge.

The field of ecology might be able to help. According to a new paper published in the journal Science, an international team of researchers has adapted an ecological "unseen species" model to estimate how many medieval European stories in the chivalric romance or heroic tradition survived and how much has been lost. The authors also presented their findings last week at a virtual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAA).

The team looked at medieval works in Dutch, English, French, German, Icelandic, and Irish and concluded that only about 9 percent of medieval manuscripts survived. However, losses were significantly lower in Icelandic and Irish literature, suggesting that island ecosystems might help preserve culture. In fact, the team's results were very similar to the estimates made by scholars using other data, such as references to lost works that appear in surviving manuscripts.

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