21st-Century Imaging Helps Scholars Reveal Rare 8th-Century Manuscript

In medieval times, Lichfield, England, was a thriving cultural and religious center. As time marched on, though, modern innovations left it behind. The canals of the 18th century, the railroads of the 19th, and the highways of the 20th all passed it by.

Now a literary scholar and a computer scientist from the University of Kentucky have brought 21st-century digital imaging to Lichfield, to study and help preserve one of its most ancient treasures: the eighth-century illustrated Latin manuscript known as the St. Chad Gospels.

The manuscript, most likely created by monkish scribes around AD 730, has staggeringly beautiful illuminations and introduces experimentation with different layers of pigment. The margins contain the earliest known examples of written Welsh. A detailed set of images will allow scholars to explore a manuscript that marks a significant point in the story of how people began to blend illustrations and words in elaborate, meaningful new ways, says William F. Endres, an assistant professor of English at Kentucky.

For instance, in an illuminated work like this, scribes would emphasize certain verses by beginning them in the left-hand margin and giving them specially ornamented letters. Beyond that, they used strategies like the one they called “a turn in the path” or “the head under the wing,” where a line nips around to continue or end in an unexpected spot, Mr. Endres says. “It really messes with the quick efficiency of reading and forces contemplation,” he explains.

The St. Chad Gospels predate the famous Book of Kells, which also marries religious narrative with wildly creative forms of illustration, by about 60 years. Although it has fewer illustrations, “it is every bit as glorious,” says Mr. Endres. But 1,300 years have produced significant wear and tear. Of the original four Gospel books, the St. Chad manuscript now contains only the Gospels of Matthew and Mark and the opening of Luke.

The manuscript suffered serious water damage at some point, according to Mr. Endres, and has some cockling (wrinkling or warping). During a rebinding in the 1960s, the pages were dipped in a conservation chemical that helped with the cockling but may have caused the pigments used in the manuscript to flake and fade. The new digital version of the manuscript will allow scholars to see through cockling or other damage and grasp the original details on the pages.

Cathedral of Knowledge

Lichfield Cathedral is the third cathedral to be built on the spot. According to the Rev. Pete Wilcox, canon chancellor of the cathedral, the manuscript was probably created in Lichfield for the shrine of St. Chad, an early bishop of what was then the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia who established Lichfield as the center of his diocese.

Except for a mysterious journey to Wales and a 30-year period during and after the English Civil War, when a Royalist family hid it for safekeeping from Oliver Cromwell’s forces, the St. Chad Gospels have remained in Lichfield.

“One of the things that makes it so precious to us is it unites us to our patron,” Mr. Wilcox says. “There is only a cathedral in Lichfield because of St. Chad, and this artifact links us within a generation to Chad.”

The manuscript also still figures in the religious observances of the cathedral. It is brought out six times a year for major festivals, and new bishops of Lichfield make their oath of allegiance holding it. So the manuscript “is not only in the hands of the community that made it, at least as we tell the story—we still use it as a sacred object,” Mr. Wilcox says.

In the fall of 2009, having traveled to Britain to give a paper, Mr. Endres decided to swing by Lichfield to take a look for himself at the Gospels, which he had previously only heard about. “I fell in love with the manuscript,” he says. “It’s just gorgeous.”

Mr. Wilcox recalls that Mr. Endres “asked us if we could furnish him with a complete set of images so that he could take his way carefully and thoroughly through every page. And the best we could do, which was a bit of a surprise to him, I think, was to supply him with a complete set of images in black and white taken in the 1940s,” along with a few more recent color images. That led Mr. Endres “to broach with me with the possibility of a fresh digitization,” Mr. Wilcox says.

Mr. Endres was well positioned to make that suggestion. At the University of Kentucky, he works closely with the Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments. Directed by W. Brent Seales, a computer-science professor at the university, the center brings together scholars from many diverse specialties, including media studies, fine arts, engineering, and literary studies.

“They have a tradition of working with English professors,” Mr. Endres says. “They worked in the 1990s with the British Library on a number of projects, which is quite exciting. I think any time you can get the humanities and the sciences combined on a project, wonderful things can happen.”

In the case of the St. Chad Gospels, Mr. Endres brought the literary expertise, while Mr. Seales came armed with 15 years of experimentation in using digital imaging to study fragile or damaged manuscripts. “I’ve been hacking away since the late 90s on problems like that, so when Bill shows up and has all this great understanding of the manuscript but no primary data, I’m like ‘Bill, I’m your guy,’” Mr. Seales recalls.

With a manuscript like the St. Chad Gospels, multispectral imaging—a series of scans, each based on a single part of the color spectrum—allows his team to create images that have the equivalent of three-dimensional detail, down to revealing the thickness of brush strokes on letters and illustrations. Cockled pages can be virtually flattened out so that all their details can be studied. Studied color band by color band, the chemical composition of ink can be determined.

Mr. Seales got interested in bringing his technological skills to bear on manuscripts through the Digital Libraries Initiative, a series of efforts begun in the 1990s by the National Science Foundation and several other agencies to get researchers in various fields working on the challenges and puzzles of the digital preservation of materials, he says. Early on, he worked on a collection at the British Library that included the Beowulf manuscript. .

“That got me thinking about damage, which is what the big challenge was,” he says. Much of the British Library collection he worked on had been through a fire and further damaged by the water used to put out the fire. So the challenge was not simply making good facsimiles of the manuscripts but how to compensate for the destruction using technology.

The problem of damage control affects any collection with ancient documents. Even if they don’t suffer a catastrophic event like a fire, manuscripts are vulnerable as they age. Vellum, a parchment made of animal skin, like that used in the St. Chad Gospels can become cockled. Scrolls become too fragile to unroll.

In 2006 the National Science Foundation awarded Mr. Seales and his team a $1.2-million grant for a project called Educe, or Enhanced Digital Unwrapping for Conservation and Exploration. The aim was to develop hardware and software for a digital-scanning system that could be used to virtually unwrap and visualize ancient texts. Instead of unrolling a fragile scroll, Mr. Seales and his team thought, it ought to be possible to use image algorithms to picture all the details of the contents digitally.

He has been using the method to attempt to digitally unroll a set of papyrus scrolls from the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum that were discovered in the 18th century. The scrolls were buried in volcanic mud and carbonized during the eruption of AD 79 that destroyed Herculaneum and Pompeii; since their re-emergence, they have had to suffer the well-intentioned efforts of scholars and preservationists who wanted to get a glimpse of their contents. Attempts to unroll them have caused them to disintegrate.

“They’re kind of like barbecue briquettes—you touch them and they’re gone,” Mr. Seales says.

He believes that eventually his team will be able virtually to see inside some of the fragile scrolls that researchers haven’t been able to get a look at yet. “Last summer we scanned them, and we’ve been hacking away at the results ever since,” he says. “I know this problem can be solved.” (Other researchers, including a team from Brigham Young University and scholars based in Europe, have made progress in recent years using multispectral imaging and other techniques to document some of the scrolls’ contents.)

The St. Chad Gospels are not in nearly as delicate a condition, but they are not the kind of thing you can just slip onto a flatbed scanner and take pictures of. The cockling, water damage, and mid-20th-century rebinding all present challenges for anyone who wants to get highly detailed images of the pages. So does the sheer age of the manuscript, which means it has to be handled with extraordinarily delicacy. It’s also a living, sacred book for the spiritual community at Lichfield Cathedral, so it must be treated with respect.

The problems left by the work on the manuscript in the 1960s are yet another example of conservation history’s many examples of well-intended interventions done without enough information about how they might affect the object in the long term. Preservationists are more and more trying to extend their future vision, Mr. Seales says, but it’s a challenge. “When you do something to it, trying to imagine how that will affect it 500 years from now—that’s not something we normally think about.” One advantage of the kind of digital imaging he specializes in is that it does not physically affect the manuscript.

For the St. Chad Gospels project, Mr. Seales’s team built a system that integrated features it had used for other manuscript-related scanning work. A key component is the multispectral imaging of each page. That allows scholars to see levels of detail that would otherwise not be visible. When the images are displayed in Kentucky on screens the size of large window panes, scholars can move and zoom by touch, as if they were working on a giant iPad, to focus on any detail they want to explore.

Mr. Seales says that the final result goes far beyond a facsimile or surface reproduction. “The field is turning the corner,” he says, “from digitizing of antiquities just so we can get beautiful resolutions of them to this idea that now we’re actually collecting data.”

When he undertakes a project like the imaging of the St. Chad Gospels, Mr. Seales wants to add data captured “measurably and objectively” that will allow scholars to, say, digitally flatten out a manuscript page that’s badly wrinkled. “It’s been one of the problems with these electronic representations,” he says, “which in the end is, How do you let the user explore that data?”

And he has come to realize that working across disciplines is necessary to pull off a project like this. “I cannot walk into Lichfield Cathedral as just a guy with a camera who wants to make measurements and make anything happen,” he says. “But when I team up with a guy like Bill who has a scholarly mandate and a love of the era—it makes sense to put a team together. Interdisciplinarity is required.”

Medieval Conditions

It took Mr. Seales and his team about two weeks last summer to complete the scanning. Representatives of the cathedral “baby-sat” the process step by step, according to Mr. Wilcox, the canon chancellor. “The Kentucky team accepted that very readily,” he says.

One of the biggest challenges was finding work space that could accommodate the equipment but didn’t require the manuscript to be removed from the premises. The cathedral “wasn’t built with power sockets, much less Internet access,” Mr. Wilcox says. They settled on a small vestry with a power source and just enough room for the camera and manuscript cradle.

The scanning was slow. Lighting and focus had to be carefully monitored, and safety precautions taken. “It’s so easy for someone to turn around and knock over a light stand,” Mr. Seales says. “So all the light stands are tied off, because it would just be a disaster.”

A team of experts in another room monitored the results too. “The tedium of this, you just can’t imagine,” he says. “The fact that you can walk out of there and go to a pub, that’s your reward.”

Still, he finds the work thrilling. “You never know what you’re going to see when you turn the page,” he says.

The team is now putting together the digital facsimile. Mr. Endres says they have 13 basic images for each page that include colors from ultraviolet to infrared. The governing body of Lichfield Cathedral and the University of Kentucky have negotiated an agreement that sets the parameters for access to the image. Mr. Wilcox says they plan to make the images available for study, although not for reproduction.

For Lichfield Cathedral, the Kentucky team’s work is part of a series of recent events that have put St. Chad’s region back on the map. Last year a major trove of Anglo-Saxon treasures was discovered less than four miles away. The Staffordshire Hoard is the largest such find yet recorded, and according to Mr. Wilcox it dates to the time when St. Chad was alive. “It’s just generated the most extraordinary popular interest,” he says. A National Geographic team visiting to film the hoard also filmed the Kentucky team at work.

Under the British system, Lichfield Cathedral receives no state funds, so it helped that the St. Chad Gospels digitization work was subsidized by Mr. Seales’s NSF grant and by the University of Kentucky. The cathedral expects to use the interest generated by the Staffordshire find to attract more visitors, especially when it hosts a temporary display next year. Mr. Wilcox says they plan to have the St. Chad Gospels mounted in an improved display by then, along with the Lichfield Angel, an Anglo-Saxon sculpture recently unearthed in the cathedral during renovations. The angel’s decorative scheme features the same unusual pale purple that graces the pages of the St. Chad Gospels.

“Now we have the most wonderful set of images to use to meet people’s interest and hunger in the manuscript,” Mr. Wilcox says. “It’s just been a fabulous gift to us, really.”

Researchers at the University of Kentucky produced this video explaining how they are using digital imaging to better understand the art and language of the rare St. Chad Gospels. (Videography: Ben Corwin; Editing: Steve Bailey, Julie Martinez; Production Assistants: Zach Whelchel, Andy Seales)