AILSA CHANG, HOST:
So last week, a group of researchers who were studying a set of medieval books published their findings. They had been looking into the material used to make the books' covers.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
In the Middle Ages, animal skins were the material of choice, but these covers were made from something these researchers had never seen before.
ELODIE LEVEQUE: It was so unusual. It didn't look like anything else we see usually. Like, usually it's calfskin, sheepskin, goatskin. We couldn't tell what it was.
KELLY: That is Elodie Leveque. She's an associate professor at the Sorbonne University in Paris, where she teaches and practices book conservation. She says, eventually, the team had to use DNA analysis to identify what kind of animal skin was used for the covers.
LEVEQUE: I didn't really believe it, although it's quite accurate. That's the point. But I just couldn't believe it.
CHANG: It was sealskin, as in (vocalizing), which was surprising because the monks who made these books - they probably didn't know what a seal was.
KELLY: These monks lived in Clairvaux. That's a very famous abbey founded almost a thousand years ago in northern France, hundreds of miles inland from any ocean. Plus, as Leveque notes...
LEVEQUE: At the time, there was no seal on the French north coast. Also there is no vernacular French word for seal.
MATTHEW COLLINS: Well, the images tell us they had never seen them before.
CHANG: That is Matthew Collins, another researcher on the project. He and Leveque say it was clear the monks had no clue what a seal might look like, judging from a picture they drew in one of their books.
COLLINS: It basically looks like it's got a dog's head.
LEVEQUE: The face of a monster, the body of a calf.
COLLINS: It's got the weirdest-looking kind of forked, tail-like legs - four of them.
LEVEQUE: The legs of a fish tail.
COLLINS: Yeah, exactly. They're rubbish, right (laughter)?
LEVEQUE: It doesn't look like a seal at all.
COLLINS: They had no idea. So these particular monks had never seen seals.
KELLY: Never seen seals - so how did these monks get sealskins? Viking traders, perhaps? The DNA analysis suggests the skins came from as far away as Norway, Iceland, even Greenland.
CHANG: Regardless of where they came from, Leveque says the sealskins were perfect for the job at hand.
LEVEQUE: Sealskins are very waterproof, so they would protect the parchment inside really well against the variations in humidity and temperature.
KELLY: The books themselves would have looked very strange to modern readers. For starters, they were huge. It took two people to hold one.
LEVEQUE: And all you would see is the fur. It has a flap, so you can't even see there is a book inside. It's - to me, it looks almost like a giant teddy bear in the shape of a book.
CHANG: The books no longer look like teddy bears. Much of the fur is gone. But Leveque and Collins say more than 100 of them do survive.
KELLY: And they provide not just an interesting cover story but also an invaluable window into life hundreds of years ago.
LEVEQUE: It gives a lot of information about life in the Middle Ages and how monks were actually connected to the world.
CHANG: Elodie Leveque and Matthew Collins, two of the researchers who studied a set of medieval books covered in sealskins.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
