The survival of medieval texts has often depended upon little more than chance. Manuscripts were destroyed by fire, discarded when their language became unreadable, cut apart by bookbinders or left forgotten in private collections. In some cases, a work remained known by its title or through quotations, but no complete copy could be found.
Yet some vanished texts have returned in remarkable ways. They have emerged from country-house cupboards, mislabelled boxes, recycled bookbindings and overlooked corners of major libraries. One enormous collection was even recovered from a cave that had been sealed for nearly 900 years. These ten rediscoveries have restored lost voices from across the medieval world.
1. The Book of Margery Kempe
The first page of the Book of Margery Kempe – British Library Add MS 61823
Written during the 1430s, The Book of Margery Kempe recounts the spiritual experiences and extensive travels of an English woman from King’s Lynn. Unable to write herself, Kempe dictated her story to scribes, describing her marriage, religious visions, conflicts with church authorities and pilgrimages to destinations including Jerusalem, Rome and Santiago de Compostela. The work is often described as the first autobiography written in English.
Brief extracts were printed during the early sixteenth century, but Kempe’s complete account disappeared. Because those extracts concentrated upon her religious experiences, readers did not realise that they came from a much larger narrative about a named medieval woman.
The only complete manuscript surfaced in 1934 at Southgate House in Derbyshire, the home of Lieutenant-Colonel William Butler-Bowdon. It had been stored among an untidy collection of family books in a cupboard also used for table-tennis equipment. According to a later family account, Butler-Bowdon had once become so frustrated while searching for balls and bats that he threatened to clear the cupboard by burning its contents.
Fortunately, the manuscript was shown instead to Albert Van de Put of the Victoria and Albert Museum. He passed it to the American scholar Hope Emily Allen, who recognised the text and established its connection to Margery Kempe. The first modern edition appeared in 1940, restoring one of the most distinctive personal voices from medieval England.
2. The Dunhuang Cavern Finds
Paul Pelliot examining manuscripts in the Library Cave, 1908 – Wikimedia Commons
In June 1900, the Daoist priest Wang Yuanlu was overseeing restoration work at the Mogao Caves near Dunhuang in northwestern China. While sand was being cleared from a corridor, he discovered a concealed entrance leading to a small chamber. Now known as Cave 17 or the Library Cave, the room was packed with more than 50,000 manuscripts, printed documents, paintings, textiles and other objects.
Most of the material dated from between the fifth and early eleventh centuries. The chamber had probably been sealed around the beginning of the eleventh century and remained hidden for nearly 900 years. Although Buddhist texts formed the majority of the collection, the cave also contained administrative records, contracts, letters, calendars, medical writings and works connected to Christianity, Daoism and Manichaeism. The documents were written in numerous languages, including Chinese, Tibetan, Sanskrit, Sogdian and Old Turkic.
Among the literary discoveries were popular Chinese narratives known as bianwen, or transformation texts, a genre that had largely vanished from the transmitted literary record. Manuscripts also preserved poems associated with Wang Fanzhi, a Tang-era poet whose humorous and critical writings had been almost entirely lost.
Wang initially guarded the chamber and alerted local officials, but the collection was eventually dispersed. Thousands of items were acquired by foreign expeditions led by Aurel Stein, Paul Pelliot and others, while additional manuscripts were transferred to Beijing. They are now divided among institutions around the world. Their discovery transformed knowledge of medieval China, Buddhism and everyday life along the Silk Roads.
3. Le Roman de Silence
Depiction of Heldris de Cornuälle in the manuscript of Le Roman de Silence
Le Roman de Silence is a thirteenth-century French verse romance attributed to an otherwise unknown writer named Heldris de Cornuälle. Its central character, Silence, is born female but raised as a boy after the king of England prohibits women from inheriting property. Silence becomes an accomplished musician, warrior and knight while the allegorical figures Nature and Nurture debate which identity should prevail.
The romance survives in only one manuscript, produced in northern France during the thirteenth century. The volume contains 18 romances and comic tales, accompanied by 83 illustrations. At some point it reached England, perhaps as war booty during the Hundred Years’ War, and eventually entered the library of the Willoughby family at Wollaton Hall near Nottingham.
By the nineteenth century, much of the Wollaton archive had been packed into hundreds of boxes. Many were dismissed with labels such as “illegible” or “of no value.” In 1911, W. H. Stevenson visited the house on behalf of the Historical Manuscripts Commission and began examining its neglected records. Among them he identified the manuscript containing the only surviving copy of Le Roman de Silence.
The text remained little studied for decades, with its first complete modern edition not appearing until 1972. It has since attracted extensive attention for its treatment of inheritance, education and medieval ideas about gender. A romance that had nearly disappeared among supposedly worthless papers is now considered one of the most unusual works of medieval French literature. You can read more about this work in The Boy Who Was a Girl: The Romance of Silence.
4. Towazugatari (The Confessions of Lady Nijō)
Lady Nijo’s A Tale Unasked has recently been translated as a Penguin Classics
Lady Nijō completed Towazugatari around 1307, after a life divided between the Japanese imperial court and years of religious travel. The work recounts events from approximately 1271 to 1306, beginning with her youth at the court of the retired emperor Go-Fukakusa. Its five books combine memoir, poetry, court history and Buddhist reflection.
The title can be translated more literally as An Unasked-for Tale. Nijō writes about court ceremonies and relationships, but also about insecurity, loss and the restricted choices available to a woman dependent upon imperial favour. After leaving the court, she became a travelling Buddhist nun and visited temples and other places associated with Japanese literary and religious history.
Despite its remarkable subject, Towazugatari disappeared from literary circulation. It was not included among the familiar classics of medieval Japanese literature, and no original medieval manuscript is known to survive. The text was preserved in a single later copy, probably made during the Edo period, which eventually entered the Imperial Household Library in Tokyo.
Around 1940, the scholar Yamagishi Tokuhei encountered the manuscript while examining the library’s holdings. It had reportedly been classified with geographical works rather than recognised as an important medieval memoir. Modern editions published after the Second World War brought Lady Nijō’s writing to a wide audience for the first time in centuries. Its recovery gave historians an unusually personal view of court life—and restored one of the most distinctive female voices in medieval Japanese literature. Click here to see the recent Penguin Classics translation.
5. The Pergaminho Sharrer
The Pergaminho Sharrer with songs by King Dinis I – Wikimedia Commons
In 1990, the American scholar Harvey L. Sharrer was conducting research in a Portuguese archive when he noticed an unusual piece of parchment. It had been reused as part of the binding of a sixteenth-century notarial register. Beneath the wear and damage were lines of Galician-Portuguese verse accompanied by musical notation.
Sharrer explained how he came across the parchment while looking through the remains of old bookbindings. “It was in very deteriorated condition but contained musical notation and texts in the vernacular, written in three columns on both sides of the folio,” he wrote. “I began reading the texts and examined more closely the notation. I quickly realized that I had before me a set of Galician-Portuguese troubadour lyrics with musical notation similar to that preserved in the Vindel manuscript and in the Cantigas de Santa Maria of Alfonso X… Tears came to my eyes as I considered the significance of the discovery.”
The parchment contained fragments of seven cantigas de amor, or courtly love songs, composed by King Dinis of Portugal, who reigned from 1279 to 1325. Dinis was a prolific poet, and the words of these seven songs were already known from later songbooks. Their melodies, however, had been lost. The reused parchment preserved music copied during the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, possibly during the king’s own lifetime. You can read more about this text in Sharrer’s aritcle, “The Discovery of Seven cantigas d’amor by Dom Dinis with Musical Notation.”
6. Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam (The Regions of the World)
The anonymous Persian geography Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam min al-Mashriq ilā al-Maghrib—The Regions of the World from East to West—was completed in 982. Its author dedicated it to Abu’l-Harith Muhammad, a ruler of the Farighunid dynasty in Guzgan, in what is now northern Afghanistan.
The book surveys the known world region by region. It describes towns, landscapes, peoples, languages, products and trade routes, extending from the Islamic world to India, China, Inner Asia and parts of Europe. It is particularly valuable because its anonymous author drew upon geographical traditions and earlier sources that have not survived independently.
For centuries, the work was known from no accessible copy. Then, in 1892, the Russian officer and orientalist Alexander Tumansky discovered a manuscript in Bukhara. It proved to be the sole surviving copy of Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam. The manuscript itself was not the tenth-century original: according to its colophon, it had been copied in 1258 by Abu’l-Mu’ayyad ‘Abd al-Qayyum ibn al-Husayn ibn ‘Ali al-Farisi.
The manuscript’s scholarly journey continued after Tumansky’s death in 1920. It eventually entered the collection of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts in 1925. Vasily Bartold published a facsimile in 1930, and Vladimir Minorsky produced an annotated English translation in 1937. The recovery of this single copy reopened an entire window onto how a tenth-century Persian geographer imagined the world.
In 1841, the German historian Georg Waitz discovered two Old High German charms in a Latin liturgical manuscript held by the cathedral chapter at Merseburg. Tobias Wolfsberg describes the moment in The Merseburg Charms:
In the year 1841, the scholar Georg Waitz, a student of the great historian Jacob Grimm, unrolled a dusty folio bound in medieval calfskin and found something unexpected, something that should not have survived. It was a manuscript of liturgical prayers—chants, blessings, formulaic devotions—all perfectly respectable for its time. But tucked between its pages, like a hidden ember, lay two short charms in Old High German, shining like raw ore amid the polished Christian verses.
The manuscript, now known as Merseburg Cathedral Library Codex 136, was probably copied during the ninth or tenth century, possibly at Fulda. The first charm is intended to release someone from bonds, while the second concerns the healing of an injured horse and invokes figures from Germanic religion, including Wodan and Frija. They are the only known Old High German charms preserving pre-Christian mythological figures.
Wolfsberg also notes that the charms were written in a practised Carolingian minuscule with careful punctuation. As he concludes, “This was no sloppy marginal note.” You can read more about the discovery and the charms themselves in Wolfsberg’s book The Merseburg Charms.
8. Waldere
One of the remaining parts of Waldere
In January 1860, E. C. Werlauff, a librarian at the Royal Library in Copenhagen, found two parchment leaves among a collection of material removed from old book bindings. The leaves contained portions of an otherwise lost Old English heroic poem, subsequently given the title Waldere. The fragments are now preserved as Copenhagen, Royal Library, Ny kgl. S. 167b.
Copied around the year 1000, the two leaves preserve only 63 lines from what was probably a substantially longer poem. The surviving passages belong to the medieval legend of Walter of Aquitaine, a hero also known from Latin, German and Old Norse versions. One fragment contains a speech encouraging Waldere before a confrontation, while the other presents his defiant response to Guthhere, king of the Burgundians.
The fragments are especially significant because they provide the only surviving evidence that the story of Walter of Aquitaine circulated in Anglo-Saxon England. They also contain familiar elements of Old English heroic poetry, including legendary weapons, warrior reputation and the combination of Germanic heroic traditions with Christian belief. Had the complete poem survived, Waldere might now be regarded alongside Beowulf as one of the major works of Old English heroic literature. Click here to learn more about the manuscript.
9. Maghāzī of Mūsā ibn ʿUqba
Mūsā ibn ʿUqba was an eighth-century scholar from Medina and the author of one of the earliest accounts of the life and military expeditions of the Prophet Muhammad. He died in 758 or 759, making his Maghāzī considerably earlier than most surviving works devoted to the same subject.
The work was highly regarded by medieval Muslim scholars and circulated widely for centuries. Later historians quoted passages from it, but the complete text eventually disappeared. A small collection of extracts survived in a manuscript in Berlin, while researchers attempted to reconstruct other parts of the work from quotations preserved by later authors. The original Maghāzī, however, was generally considered lost.
That changed in 2021, when a manuscript was identified in the National Library of Tunisia. Rather than containing the complete work, it preserves approximately two-thirds of the text, beginning with the change in the direction of prayer towards Mecca and continuing to the Farewell Pilgrimage. An Arabic edition based on the Tunis manuscript appeared in 2023, followed by an English translations as The Maghāzī of Sayyidunā Muhammad.
The most recent discovery on our list was only announced a few months ago. Historians Adrian C. Pirtea and Alexander Hourani each independently came across a manuscript in the collection of the famed Saint Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai. The work itself had been discovered in 1975 when a walled-up room was rediscovered. However the text was too much damaged by water and many pages were stuck together. High-resolution digital photographs eventually allowed historians to examine the writing closely and recognise its significance.
Pirtea’s analysis revealed that this text is a previously unknown Christian universal chronicle. The surviving manuscript dates from the thirteenth century and contains an Arabic translation of a lost Syriac work composed in 712 or 713. Pirtea gave it the conventional title the Maronite Chronicle of 713 because its author appears to have belonged to a Syriac Christian community closely connected with the Monastery of Mar Maron.
The chronicle begins with the creation of the world and continues through biblical, Roman, Persian and Christian history. Its most valuable section covers the seventh century, including the Byzantine–Sasanian War, the emergence of Islam, the Arab conquests and subsequent conflicts between the Byzantine Empire and the Umayyad Caliphate. The surviving narrative ends with events in 692–693. Learn more about it at Previously Unknown Medieval Chronicle Discovered.
Many lost medieval works may still be waiting to be recognised in libraries, archives and manuscript collections around the world. As more collections are catalogued and digitised, and new technologies make damaged or faded texts readable, further rediscoveries seem almost certain. The next major medieval work may already be sitting on a shelf, hidden in plain sight.
Top Image: The Book of Margery Kempe, now on display at the British Library
The survival of medieval texts has often depended upon little more than chance. Manuscripts were destroyed by fire, discarded when their language became unreadable, cut apart by bookbinders or left forgotten in private collections. In some cases, a work remained known by its title or through quotations, but no complete copy could be found.
Yet some vanished texts have returned in remarkable ways. They have emerged from country-house cupboards, mislabelled boxes, recycled bookbindings and overlooked corners of major libraries. One enormous collection was even recovered from a cave that had been sealed for nearly 900 years. These ten rediscoveries have restored lost voices from across the medieval world.
1. The Book of Margery Kempe
Written during the 1430s, The Book of Margery Kempe recounts the spiritual experiences and extensive travels of an English woman from King’s Lynn. Unable to write herself, Kempe dictated her story to scribes, describing her marriage, religious visions, conflicts with church authorities and pilgrimages to destinations including Jerusalem, Rome and Santiago de Compostela. The work is often described as the first autobiography written in English.
Brief extracts were printed during the early sixteenth century, but Kempe’s complete account disappeared. Because those extracts concentrated upon her religious experiences, readers did not realise that they came from a much larger narrative about a named medieval woman.
The only complete manuscript surfaced in 1934 at Southgate House in Derbyshire, the home of Lieutenant-Colonel William Butler-Bowdon. It had been stored among an untidy collection of family books in a cupboard also used for table-tennis equipment. According to a later family account, Butler-Bowdon had once become so frustrated while searching for balls and bats that he threatened to clear the cupboard by burning its contents.
Fortunately, the manuscript was shown instead to Albert Van de Put of the Victoria and Albert Museum. He passed it to the American scholar Hope Emily Allen, who recognised the text and established its connection to Margery Kempe. The first modern edition appeared in 1940, restoring one of the most distinctive personal voices from medieval England.
2. The Dunhuang Cavern Finds
In June 1900, the Daoist priest Wang Yuanlu was overseeing restoration work at the Mogao Caves near Dunhuang in northwestern China. While sand was being cleared from a corridor, he discovered a concealed entrance leading to a small chamber. Now known as Cave 17 or the Library Cave, the room was packed with more than 50,000 manuscripts, printed documents, paintings, textiles and other objects.
Most of the material dated from between the fifth and early eleventh centuries. The chamber had probably been sealed around the beginning of the eleventh century and remained hidden for nearly 900 years. Although Buddhist texts formed the majority of the collection, the cave also contained administrative records, contracts, letters, calendars, medical writings and works connected to Christianity, Daoism and Manichaeism. The documents were written in numerous languages, including Chinese, Tibetan, Sanskrit, Sogdian and Old Turkic.
Among the literary discoveries were popular Chinese narratives known as bianwen, or transformation texts, a genre that had largely vanished from the transmitted literary record. Manuscripts also preserved poems associated with Wang Fanzhi, a Tang-era poet whose humorous and critical writings had been almost entirely lost.
Wang initially guarded the chamber and alerted local officials, but the collection was eventually dispersed. Thousands of items were acquired by foreign expeditions led by Aurel Stein, Paul Pelliot and others, while additional manuscripts were transferred to Beijing. They are now divided among institutions around the world. Their discovery transformed knowledge of medieval China, Buddhism and everyday life along the Silk Roads.
3. Le Roman de Silence
Le Roman de Silence is a thirteenth-century French verse romance attributed to an otherwise unknown writer named Heldris de Cornuälle. Its central character, Silence, is born female but raised as a boy after the king of England prohibits women from inheriting property. Silence becomes an accomplished musician, warrior and knight while the allegorical figures Nature and Nurture debate which identity should prevail.
The romance survives in only one manuscript, produced in northern France during the thirteenth century. The volume contains 18 romances and comic tales, accompanied by 83 illustrations. At some point it reached England, perhaps as war booty during the Hundred Years’ War, and eventually entered the library of the Willoughby family at Wollaton Hall near Nottingham.
By the nineteenth century, much of the Wollaton archive had been packed into hundreds of boxes. Many were dismissed with labels such as “illegible” or “of no value.” In 1911, W. H. Stevenson visited the house on behalf of the Historical Manuscripts Commission and began examining its neglected records. Among them he identified the manuscript containing the only surviving copy of Le Roman de Silence.
The text remained little studied for decades, with its first complete modern edition not appearing until 1972. It has since attracted extensive attention for its treatment of inheritance, education and medieval ideas about gender. A romance that had nearly disappeared among supposedly worthless papers is now considered one of the most unusual works of medieval French literature. You can read more about this work in The Boy Who Was a Girl: The Romance of Silence.
4. Towazugatari (The Confessions of Lady Nijō)
Lady Nijō completed Towazugatari around 1307, after a life divided between the Japanese imperial court and years of religious travel. The work recounts events from approximately 1271 to 1306, beginning with her youth at the court of the retired emperor Go-Fukakusa. Its five books combine memoir, poetry, court history and Buddhist reflection.
The title can be translated more literally as An Unasked-for Tale. Nijō writes about court ceremonies and relationships, but also about insecurity, loss and the restricted choices available to a woman dependent upon imperial favour. After leaving the court, she became a travelling Buddhist nun and visited temples and other places associated with Japanese literary and religious history.
Despite its remarkable subject, Towazugatari disappeared from literary circulation. It was not included among the familiar classics of medieval Japanese literature, and no original medieval manuscript is known to survive. The text was preserved in a single later copy, probably made during the Edo period, which eventually entered the Imperial Household Library in Tokyo.
Around 1940, the scholar Yamagishi Tokuhei encountered the manuscript while examining the library’s holdings. It had reportedly been classified with geographical works rather than recognised as an important medieval memoir. Modern editions published after the Second World War brought Lady Nijō’s writing to a wide audience for the first time in centuries. Its recovery gave historians an unusually personal view of court life—and restored one of the most distinctive female voices in medieval Japanese literature. Click here to see the recent Penguin Classics translation.
5. The Pergaminho Sharrer
In 1990, the American scholar Harvey L. Sharrer was conducting research in a Portuguese archive when he noticed an unusual piece of parchment. It had been reused as part of the binding of a sixteenth-century notarial register. Beneath the wear and damage were lines of Galician-Portuguese verse accompanied by musical notation.
Sharrer explained how he came across the parchment while looking through the remains of old bookbindings. “It was in very deteriorated condition but contained musical notation and texts in the vernacular, written in three columns on both sides of the folio,” he wrote. “I began reading the texts and examined more closely the notation. I quickly realized that I had before me a set of Galician-Portuguese troubadour lyrics with musical notation similar to that preserved in the Vindel manuscript and in the Cantigas de Santa Maria of Alfonso X… Tears came to my eyes as I considered the significance of the discovery.”
The parchment contained fragments of seven cantigas de amor, or courtly love songs, composed by King Dinis of Portugal, who reigned from 1279 to 1325. Dinis was a prolific poet, and the words of these seven songs were already known from later songbooks. Their melodies, however, had been lost. The reused parchment preserved music copied during the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, possibly during the king’s own lifetime. You can read more about this text in Sharrer’s aritcle, “The Discovery of Seven cantigas d’amor by Dom Dinis with Musical Notation.”
6. Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam (The Regions of the World)
The anonymous Persian geography Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam min al-Mashriq ilā al-Maghrib—The Regions of the World from East to West—was completed in 982. Its author dedicated it to Abu’l-Harith Muhammad, a ruler of the Farighunid dynasty in Guzgan, in what is now northern Afghanistan.
The book surveys the known world region by region. It describes towns, landscapes, peoples, languages, products and trade routes, extending from the Islamic world to India, China, Inner Asia and parts of Europe. It is particularly valuable because its anonymous author drew upon geographical traditions and earlier sources that have not survived independently.
For centuries, the work was known from no accessible copy. Then, in 1892, the Russian officer and orientalist Alexander Tumansky discovered a manuscript in Bukhara. It proved to be the sole surviving copy of Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam. The manuscript itself was not the tenth-century original: according to its colophon, it had been copied in 1258 by Abu’l-Mu’ayyad ‘Abd al-Qayyum ibn al-Husayn ibn ‘Ali al-Farisi.
The manuscript’s scholarly journey continued after Tumansky’s death in 1920. It eventually entered the collection of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts in 1925. Vasily Bartold published a facsimile in 1930, and Vladimir Minorsky produced an annotated English translation in 1937. The recovery of this single copy reopened an entire window onto how a tenth-century Persian geographer imagined the world.
7. The Merseburg Charms
In 1841, the German historian Georg Waitz discovered two Old High German charms in a Latin liturgical manuscript held by the cathedral chapter at Merseburg. Tobias Wolfsberg describes the moment in The Merseburg Charms:
In the year 1841, the scholar Georg Waitz, a student of the great historian Jacob Grimm, unrolled a dusty folio bound in medieval calfskin and found something unexpected, something that should not have survived. It was a manuscript of liturgical prayers—chants, blessings, formulaic devotions—all perfectly respectable for its time. But tucked between its pages, like a hidden ember, lay two short charms in Old High German, shining like raw ore amid the polished Christian verses.
The manuscript, now known as Merseburg Cathedral Library Codex 136, was probably copied during the ninth or tenth century, possibly at Fulda. The first charm is intended to release someone from bonds, while the second concerns the healing of an injured horse and invokes figures from Germanic religion, including Wodan and Frija. They are the only known Old High German charms preserving pre-Christian mythological figures.
Wolfsberg also notes that the charms were written in a practised Carolingian minuscule with careful punctuation. As he concludes, “This was no sloppy marginal note.” You can read more about the discovery and the charms themselves in Wolfsberg’s book The Merseburg Charms.
8. Waldere
In January 1860, E. C. Werlauff, a librarian at the Royal Library in Copenhagen, found two parchment leaves among a collection of material removed from old book bindings. The leaves contained portions of an otherwise lost Old English heroic poem, subsequently given the title Waldere. The fragments are now preserved as Copenhagen, Royal Library, Ny kgl. S. 167b.
Copied around the year 1000, the two leaves preserve only 63 lines from what was probably a substantially longer poem. The surviving passages belong to the medieval legend of Walter of Aquitaine, a hero also known from Latin, German and Old Norse versions. One fragment contains a speech encouraging Waldere before a confrontation, while the other presents his defiant response to Guthhere, king of the Burgundians.
The fragments are especially significant because they provide the only surviving evidence that the story of Walter of Aquitaine circulated in Anglo-Saxon England. They also contain familiar elements of Old English heroic poetry, including legendary weapons, warrior reputation and the combination of Germanic heroic traditions with Christian belief. Had the complete poem survived, Waldere might now be regarded alongside Beowulf as one of the major works of Old English heroic literature. Click here to learn more about the manuscript.
9. Maghāzī of Mūsā ibn ʿUqba
Mūsā ibn ʿUqba was an eighth-century scholar from Medina and the author of one of the earliest accounts of the life and military expeditions of the Prophet Muhammad. He died in 758 or 759, making his Maghāzī considerably earlier than most surviving works devoted to the same subject.
The work was highly regarded by medieval Muslim scholars and circulated widely for centuries. Later historians quoted passages from it, but the complete text eventually disappeared. A small collection of extracts survived in a manuscript in Berlin, while researchers attempted to reconstruct other parts of the work from quotations preserved by later authors. The original Maghāzī, however, was generally considered lost.
That changed in 2021, when a manuscript was identified in the National Library of Tunisia. Rather than containing the complete work, it preserves approximately two-thirds of the text, beginning with the change in the direction of prayer towards Mecca and continuing to the Farewell Pilgrimage. An Arabic edition based on the Tunis manuscript appeared in 2023, followed by an English translations as The Maghāzī of Sayyidunā Muhammad.
10. The Maronite Chronicle of 713
The most recent discovery on our list was only announced a few months ago. Historians Adrian C. Pirtea and Alexander Hourani each independently came across a manuscript in the collection of the famed Saint Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai. The work itself had been discovered in 1975 when a walled-up room was rediscovered. However the text was too much damaged by water and many pages were stuck together. High-resolution digital photographs eventually allowed historians to examine the writing closely and recognise its significance.
Pirtea’s analysis revealed that this text is a previously unknown Christian universal chronicle. The surviving manuscript dates from the thirteenth century and contains an Arabic translation of a lost Syriac work composed in 712 or 713. Pirtea gave it the conventional title the Maronite Chronicle of 713 because its author appears to have belonged to a Syriac Christian community closely connected with the Monastery of Mar Maron.
The chronicle begins with the creation of the world and continues through biblical, Roman, Persian and Christian history. Its most valuable section covers the seventh century, including the Byzantine–Sasanian War, the emergence of Islam, the Arab conquests and subsequent conflicts between the Byzantine Empire and the Umayyad Caliphate. The surviving narrative ends with events in 692–693. Learn more about it at Previously Unknown Medieval Chronicle Discovered.
Many lost medieval works may still be waiting to be recognised in libraries, archives and manuscript collections around the world. As more collections are catalogued and digitised, and new technologies make damaged or faded texts readable, further rediscoveries seem almost certain. The next major medieval work may already be sitting on a shelf, hidden in plain sight.
Top Image: The Book of Margery Kempe, now on display at the British Library
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