MEDIEVAL BOOKS MEDIANS* : STUDENTS GLOBAL ESSAY

SEALED DEALS : Covering these medieval books, a shaggy surprise. Medieval scribes filled volumes called bestiaries with illustrations and descriptions of fantastic creatures. The manuscripts with representations of these animals also relied on a variety of boasts :

The covers of these and other volumes were fashioned from the skins of calves, goats, sheep, deer, pigs and, in some macabre instances, humans.

Most of these hides were shorn before they were turned into book bindings. But one set of medieval manuscripts from northeastern France has a peculiar finish : Its weathered covers are covered in clumps of hair.

'' These books are too rough and far too hairy to be calfskin,'' said Matthew Collins, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Copenhagen and Cambridge University in England, and an author of the new study.

But identifying the source of the shaggy leather has proved difficult.

While these furry tomes would seem at home in the Hogwarts Library, they were originally made in the scriptorium of Clairvaux Abbey, a hub for an order of Roman Catholic monks, the Cistercians.

The abbey, founded in 1115 in the Champagne-Ardenne region of France, was home to one of the largest monastic libraries in medieval Europe.

Some 1,450 volumes of the abbey's extensive corpus survive, with about half remaining in their original bindings. Many were bound during the 12th and 13th centuries, with the parchment placed between wooden boards and fastened with thread and cord.

At Clairvaux Abbey, these books often housed inside a secondary cover bristling with fur. Traditionally, this unshorn leather was thought to be made from boars or deer, but the hair follicles on some of the manuscripts do not match the fur of either mammal.  

Dr. Collins and his colleagues examined the hairy covers of 16 manuscripts that were once housed at Clairvaux Abbey. The researchers rubbed the flesh side of the leather with erasers to carefully remove crumb-size samples.

They often utilized a range of techniques to analyze protein sequences and bits of ancient DNA from the leather.

Their findings, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, reveal that the books are bound not in the hides of local land mammals, but in sealskin. 

Several books were bound in harbor seal skin, and at least one came from a harp seal.

Comparing them with contemporary DNA suggests an origin of the seals in Scandinavia and Scotland, or as far away as Iceland or Greenland.

Seals were valuable because of their meat, blubber and waterproof skin, which could be fashioned into boots and gloves. Some records even claim that sealskin was used to pay church taxes.

Communities in Scandinavia and Ireland used sealskin to bind books, but the practice was much rarer in mainland Europe.

The World Students Society thanks Jack Tamisiea.