CC-BY SUZANNE REITZ, DEN ARNAMAGNÆANSKE SAMLING (COPENHAGEN)
King Arthur’s lasting renown is one for the books. But a statistical spotlight now shines on medieval European literature’s round table of lost and forgotten stories.
An international team used a mathematical formula borrowed from ecology to estimate the extent to which medieval adventure and romance tales, and documents on which they were written, have been lost over the years. Only about 9 percent of these documents may have survived till modern times, the researchers found.
These findings indicate that simple statistical principles can be used to gauge losses of a range of past cultural items, such as specific types of stone tools or ancient coins, literature professor Mike Kestemont of the University of Antwerp in Belgium and his colleagues report in the Feb. 18 Science.
Their approach represents a simple but powerful tool for studying culture, says anthropologist Alex Bentley of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who did not participate in the study. “It’s like walking into an abandoned Amazon book warehouse decades later and estimating the total number of book titles based on the numbers of surviving single and double copies that you find.”
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.
Kestemont’s team turned to a formula developed by environmental statistician and study coauthor Anne Chao of National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. Chao’s statistical technique accounts for species that go undetected by researchers in field surveys of biological diversity. More generally, her approach can be used to estimate the number of unobserved events of any type that accompany relatively frequent observed events of the same type.
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. READ MORE...
