"This is something at the end of the day that I know is cool," he said. He said he likes the history and beauty of the parchment - and the story of how he stumbled upon it. But Sideri said he has no intention of selling it. The parchment is worth upward of $10,000, according to Davis. It's a treasure both because of its age and condition, which is far better than the other page in the Colby collection, said Megan Cook, Sideri's former professor, who teaches medieval literature at Colby. The page purchased by Sideri is of particular interest to scholars. All told, the missal numbered 309 pages in its original form. "Thousands of unique manuscripts were destroyed and scattered this way," Davis said.ĭavis has painstakingly researched The Beauvais Missal and has tracked down more than 100 individual pages across the country. Not only did it look like medieval manuscripts that Sideri had studied at Colby College, but it also included a note that read: 1285 AD. According to the Maine Monitor, the framed page immediately caught Sideri’s eye. The practice was common in the early 20th century. Instead, he stumbled across a page from a 700-year-old medieval manuscript valued at between 5,000 and 10,000. The full missal was once owned by William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper publisher, before being sold in the 1940s and, much to the consternation of today's academics, was divvied up into individual pages, she said. Sideri bought the medieval manuscript for 75 at an estate sale on Sept. The parchment was part of a prayer book and priests' liturgy, said Lisa Fagin Davis, executive director of the Medieval Academy of America and a professor of manuscript studies at Simmons University in Boston. This photo provided by Will Sideri shows a 700-year-old manuscript that was used in the Beauvais Cathedral in France.
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