
‘Lost’ songs from the Middle Ages are brought back to life - tintinnabula
http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/first-performance-in-1000-years-lost-songs-from-the-middle-ages-are-brought-back-to-life-0
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raddad
I found the translated text of "The Consolation of Philosophy", by Anicus
Manlius Severinus Boethius

[https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14328/14328-h/14328-h.htm](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14328/14328-h/14328-h.htm)

"It has been translated into every European tongue, and into English nearly a
dozen times, from King Alfred's paraphrase to the translations of Lord
Preston, Causton, Ridpath, and Duncan, in the eighteenth century."

Books were expensive. A very rough calculation is about $450 a book. Amazon
could have made as killing back then.

List of prices of medieval items

[http://www.luminarium.org/medlit/medprice.htm](http://www.luminarium.org/medlit/medprice.htm)

How Much Is That in Today’s Money?

[http://www.history.org/foundation/journal/Summer02/money2.cf...](http://www.history.org/foundation/journal/Summer02/money2.cfm)

(I did say _roughly_ )

~~~
bsder
> Books were expensive. A very rough calculation is about $450 a book. Amazon
> could have made as killing back then.

 _Paper_ was expensive. It wasn't until wood pulp techniques hit in the 1840's
that the price of paper actually dropped significantly.

~~~
dalke
Did you put " _Paper_ " in italics to suggest that paper was the primary cost
in book making in the medieval era?

Because I would have thought that manual copying by scribes - the above link
says it took 15 months to copy the Bible - would be more expensive.

Also, I believe the price of paper also dropped significantly in Europe when
the paper mills were introduced in the 1500s. So dates
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_paper#Europe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_paper#Europe)
.

~~~
bsder
Bibles were chained to desks because the parchment was valuable.

The fact that many times people were willing to scrape off the ink tends to
imply that the manual labor involved in copying was cheaper than the
substrate.

Paper mills did reduce the cost. However, paper relied on rags, and rags
relied on people discarding clothing. And people only discarded cloth (which
was also really expensive) only when the cloth was completely useless.

[http://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-
history-l...](http://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-
lesson-in.html)

~~~
dalke
I agree that paper was expensive. I don't see evidence that paper was the
paramount, much less primary cost, of book making, assuming that explains the
italics. Though I haven't looked hard.

I think you've mixed up two writing materials. "Parchment" refers to animal-
based materials like vellum, not paper. Yes, people scraped the ink off
parchment. But according to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_paper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_paper)
, deinking of paper wasn't invented until the 1700s. The same source says in
the 1300s or so, the price of paper was about 1/6th the price of parchment,
"and then falling further."

Your cost model says only that the labor for removing ink from parchment was
less than the price of making new parchment. For made up numbers, let's say
the effective price to make new parchment was $15,000 and the price to scrape
the ink off was $10,000. How does that help figure out if the price to copy
was $4,000 or $40,0000?

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ChrisDutrow
This is really cool.

Has anyone found where you can buy and/or listen to the whole song?

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JoeDaDude
Recreating ancient music is a fascinating endeavor because notation was either
non-existent or difficult to read, like the piece discussed in the article.
Another reconstruction, from ancient Egypt this time, is made from gestures
left on wall inscriptions (archived webpage):
[https://web.archive.org/web/20151012085128/http://www.rakkav...](https://web.archive.org/web/20151012085128/http://www.rakkav.com/biblemusic/pages/chironomy.htm)

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cpr
Bagby does a beautiful rendition of Beowulf. We heard him a couple of times at
the Renaissance and Baroque Society of Pittsburgh, where I've been taking our
kids for 20 some years.

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pc2g4d
"The Consolation of Philosophy" is one of my favorite books, so it's exciting
to learn about this musical interpretation of it. I hope I can listen to the
upcoming rendition soon!

