Lost medieval storybooks hold a statistical revival.
Much medieval European literature, which dates to between roughly the years 600 and 1450, has been lost, and many surviving manuscripts are fragmentary. Durable parchment documents were often recycled as small boxes or for other practical uses. That has left researchers unsure about whether surviving tales and documents are representative of what once existed.
So, for example, this formula might be used to estimate the number of undiscovered archaeological sites in an early state society where the biggest settlements have been easier to find than smaller ones. Kestemont’s group estimates that about 799 literary tales survive today out of what would have been an original total of around 1,170 stories, at least for the six languages that were studied. The 3,648 surviving written accounts of those tales come from an estimated original total of around 40,614 documents, the researchers say.
Handwritten versions of those medieval adventure and romance stories — often created by individuals in the general population who avidly consumed fictional literature — have fared poorly across the board. Survival rates of those documents range from an estimated 4.9 percent for English yarns to 19.2 percent for Irish tales, the researchers report.
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