Hidden in plain sight: U of T researchers uncover rare 15th-century French royal letter

Original story can be found on A&S News and additional story can be found on U of T News.

Deep within the collections of the Robertson Davies Library at Massey College, there’s a scrap of parchment — torn, faded and browned with age — that secretly contains multitudes. A group of U of T researchers, scholars and librarians has now identified it as part of a 15th‑century letter drafted from King Louis XI, otherwise known as the “Spider King”: one of the most powerful and influential figures in the French monarchy.

How did a humble scrap yield such incredible findings? The answer is book science: a field where specialists across disciplines collaborate and use technology to unearth hidden stories about ancient materials and the people and communities who made them.

The Old Books New Science Lab (OBNS) is U of T’s book-science hive, and it’s growing. Founded in 2014 by Alexandra Gillespie — vice-president and principal of U of T Mississauga and a professor of medieval studies — the lab’s work spans two campuses (U of T Mississauga and St. George in downtown Toronto), supports multiple major projects, and has brought together more than 100 collaborators across the university and from institutions around the world.

Massey College assistant librarian and rare books specialist Chana Algarvio is part of this network. She regularly catalogues rare materials, which includes donations of fragments from old manuscripts, used to reinforce book spines in the early days of bookbinding. From fragments of musical compositions to Persian manuscript leaves, every piece has a story.

In 2017, longtime Massey College donor and owner of the award-winning Aliquando Press William Rueter donated a batch of fragments gathered from the holdings of a great-uncle in Amsterdam, including one chosen for the beauty of its calligraphy. It caught the eye of Massey’s then-assistant librarian Julia King, who suspected the item was a medieval French royal charter — but couldn’t identify anything further due to its faded condition. At the time, she flagged it to OBNS’s head of research, Jessica Lockhart: “She said, ‘If you ever have the tools to analyze items like this, there could be something here,’” Lockhart recalls.

Fast forward to fall of 2024, and Lockhart was visiting the Massey library to review some other items. Algarvio pulled out the Rueter Collection fragments, including the medieval scrap, and they took a closer look with Lockhart’s Dino-lite — a handheld UV/NIR microscope from the OBNS lab that analyzes the chemical properties of documents. Lockhart and Algarvio quickly realized this faded scrap of paper was something special indeed — and OBNS now had the proper technology to analyze it.

“It was a wondrous moment — really striking, because the page looks essentially blank when you look at it with your eyes,” Lockhart says. “But when we started using the UV light, the writing almost leapt back into existence. It was an excellent candidate for the MISHA.”

MISHA stands for Multispectral Imaging System for the Humanities and Archives. It is a specialized tool used at a central hub for OBNS — the Andrews Project for Book Science, established at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library in fall of 2024 through a $1 million donation from engineer, rare book collector, and longtime friend of the Fisher, Mark Andrews.

Overseen by Andrews Postdoctoral Fellow Stephanie Lahey, with the support of postgraduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and Fisher Library staff, the MISHA has so far uncovered astonishing details from the Fisher’s holdings, from uncovering blurred text in an ancient Hebrew codex to identifying a dried flower pressed in a letter written by a First World War sol soldier.

Lockhart and Algarvio made a Fisher appointment and watched excitedly as Lahey scanned the scrap, uncovering new details.

“What grabbed me as a book scientist was a strange pattern of fading ink, and some ink marks in the margin that showed how it had been folded,” Lahey says. “With the MISHA we were able to get a sense of the order in which the folds had been made and were able to almost refold the document virtually as a result.”

With the MISHA scan completed, Lockhart took the question of identification back to the OBNS community. She shared the image in a Slack channel called “Can You Read This?” and Sebastian Sobecki — a professor of later medieval English literature in the Department of English, with a cross-appointment to the Centre for Medieval Studies and a longtime member of the OBNS network — answered the call. As he reviewed the fragment, a few attributes quickly jumped out.

“If you look at these types of materials long enough, you start recognizing patterns — almost like recognizing your parent’s handwriting,” he explains. “It was clear that the handwriting was from a late 15th century French clerk — a trained bureaucrat, writing very neatly in a script style that can only be French. Moreover, it had to be from the regional parliament in Toulouse, as these documents are written in a very technical legalese, almost a formula. Once you date the handwriting specifically like this, you can really narrow it down.”

While Sobecki had successfully identified the language, calligraphy and origin of the missive, he was getting stuck on the type of document it was. However, a closer look at the MISHA’s findings painted a clearer picture.

“Through the MISHA images, we saw that ink that was transferred from the bottom to the top — the pattern showed it was a twice-folded letter,” he says. “Every government document has a different folding pattern depending on where the seal goes. By identifying the folds, it helped us confirm what type of record it was — and this wouldn’t have been possible without the MISHA.”

With these clues, Sobecki was able to confirm the fragment’s remarkable origin as part of a 15th-century lettre patente issued under Louis XI: likely a formal response to a petition, written in precise legal language.

Louis XI’s own reputation lends additional significance to the discovery — and perhaps some notoriety. The monarch had earned the (somewhat unflattering) moniker of Spider King from his enemies, who saw him as a meddling diplomat who spun “webs” of conspiracy. However, history also remembers Louis XI as a clever administrator who was instrumental in forming the modern French nation state through the centralization of power.

“These lettres patentes — these government instruments — were really important to the making of the modern French bureaucracy,” Sobecki says. “And it was a unified system that worked – and was foundational to the Napoleonic code, on which Quebec’s law is based. So you could say many of Louis XI’s policies form the DNA of Quebec’s law code, and Canadian law.”

The Massey fragment continues to find new life through scholarship.

Members of the OBNS team are now working on further transcription and translation, while Lahey and Sobecki are working on a paper about the discovery. And with support from the Andrews project, Lahey and OBNS graduate student Isra Saymour have created an interactive website that outlines the discovery beautifully.

Scrolling through the site, it’s clear this was a truly collaborative effort; driven by curiosity, scholarly expertise, and tenacity, with the MISHA the key to unlocking the letter’s provenance.

“This is such an exciting discovery because it’s been fuelled by technology,” Sobecki says. “I have worked with a lot of significant records, but the MISHA extended my vision and understanding of the letter in an entirely new way. If so much rests on one little fragment, imagine how much the entire letter holds?”

For Gillespie, the Spider King fragment is a testament to the power of interdisciplinary research. "This has been such a fun ride," she says. "It's the sort of discovery that has required everything from the expertise of medieval literature scholars to cutting-edge scanning technology — and it could only happen at a place like the University of Toronto."

And there may be more discoveries to come.

Rare book librarians like Algarvio are eager to revisit materials at Massey and in the Fisher holdings, to see if tools like the MISHA can uncover more tantalizing secrets below the surface. “As a rare book librarian, I want to be a gate opener and bring more of our rare materials to the forefront — for primary source teaching and research,” she says. “What’s the purpose of these items if they’re just gathering dust on a shelf? It’s truly surreal to think that even one little fragment buried in one of our folders has so much meaning to it.”