The Skin Keeps the Score: DNA Analysis of Medieval Manor Court Rolls

The field of biocodicology, or the study of books and documents through analysis of the biological information stored within them, is still nascent. Yet it is already transforming both what we can learn from manuscripts and the questions we pose of them. This talk reports on the work of an interdisciplinary team at North Carolina State University comprising humanists, geneticists, and bioinformatics specialists. The first part of the talk will cover the development and validation of a new non-destructive sampling technique that employs cytology brushes to collect samples from parchment for genetic analysis. Building on this foundation, we tested close to 100 manuscripts spanning 700 to 1700 CE, the results of which were recently published in Manuscript Studies. The second part of the talk will turn to the next phase of our research: the DNA analysis of medieval manor court rolls held across three partner institutions. These manuscripts are potentially of great value because the skins were sourced from local herds and document events such as livestock epidemics, famines, and agricultural crises that may be genetically detectable in the parchment itself, thus allowing researchers to corroborate genetic evidence from livestock and pathogens with textual records.