English scholars ‘piece together history’ to reunite missing pages of centuries-old Catholic text

English researchers have reunited missing pages of a centuries-old Catholic devotional text by locating fragments held in a public archive. Professors Katie Walter of the University of Sussex and James Wade of Girton College at the University of Cambridge identified the pages in the East Sussex public records office.

The researchers discovered that these fragments belong to a complete manuscript of The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Christ held at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. The Yale manuscript, which was previously known to be owned by Tudor-era royal courtier John Gage, had been missing those specific pages for years.

The text is a translation of a 14th-century work by the English monk Nicholas Love. It was a popular book among English Catholics before the Reformation. Wade and Walter detailed their findings in the journal Notes and Queries.