Fragments in the Herlufsholm Collection: book historical and technological approaches

Lecture by Baharan Pourahmadi
and Charlotte Epple
(University of Southern Denmark)

The old library of Herlufsholm Skole (est. 1565), now kept at the University Library of Southern Denmark, contains a wealth of 16^th and 17^th century printed books. Many are still in contemporary bindings which are often made of reused leaves from medieval manuscripts of printed books. The lecture will present the results of recent research on this corpus of medieval and early modern fragments.

Baharan Pourahmadi will present technologies used to restore and enhance the legibility of hidden manuscript fragments from the Herlufsholm Collection. She will present techniques from image processing and machine learning applied to challenging visual data, where the writing is faint, distorted, or obscured. Unlike typical AI applications, this research operates with very limited and imperfect data, requiring models to be adapted in unconventional ways. She will demonstrate how these methods can improve legibility, what is currently possible, and where the technology still falls short.

Charlotte Epple will present the fragments from a book historical perspective, exploring their diverse contents and origins. They demonstrate a remarkable thematic breadth, ranging from pieces of a Carolingian homiliary to late medieval music for the mass or uncut printed sheets of a suppressed 17^th century almanac from Oxford. The fragments are not only an important part of Herlufsholm’s library history, but also evidence of the ways in which books circulated across Western Europe in the early modern period.

The research presented in this lecture is funded by the Horizon Europe Program for Research and Innovation under the action Horizon MSCA Doctoral Network, Grant Agreement No. 101073543.