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Manuscripts 'treated as fossils'
An ancient text can tell a historian fascinating stories about the people and the culture that created it.
A palaeontologist has come up with a novel way of studying historical manuscripts, by treating them as fossils from an extinct species.
John Cisne, writing in Science magazine, says manuscripts from the Middle Ages have a lot in common with animal populations.
For this reason, he claims, he can work out how many copies of a manuscript once existed and how regularly they were destroyed, simply by applying a biological model.
Historians have cautiously welcomed this rare link between the arts and sciences.
Dalje
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