Robert Bartlett's "History in Flames"

Robert Bartlett is Professor Emeritus at the University of St Andrews. His books include The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950–1350, which won the Wolfson Literary Prize for History. He has written and presented three television series for the BBC, Inside the Medieval Mind (2008), The Normans (2010), and The Plantagenets (2014).

Bartlett applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, History in Flames: The Destruction and Survival of Medieval Manuscripts, and reported the following:

Page 99 of History in Flames is deep in the build-up to the Irish civil war of 1922, when those fighting for Irish independence had to decide whether to accept a half-way house or not. The half-way house on offer was (1) a partitioned Ireland and (2) a "Free State" that recognized the British monarch as its head of state. The two sides on this issue began fighting and one consequence was the destruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland and the incineration of 800 years of Irish historical records.

This is what the book is about - the loss of written records of the medieval past, not though flood, mice or accidental fires, but though human violence. It begins with discussion of how a manuscript culture works - everything is hand written and hence precarious, and we wonder how can we know what has been lost, what can be saved.

Theere are five case studies, from Strasbourg in 1870 to Chartres in 1944. And a conclusion "we make the past but can also lose it".

Learn more about History in Flames at the Cambridge University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages.

The Page 99 Test: Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?.

--Marshal Zeringue