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A 600-year-old book that once belonged to a personal attendant of King Henry VIII is helping to reveal the shifting allegiances and religious ferment that captured the Tudor court, shaping world history along the way.<\/p>\n
The book in question is a copy of Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ,<\/i> a religious tract that was translated and adapted from Latin early in the 15th century by a monk named Nicholas Love. It was a \u201cmedieval bestseller,\u201d says James Wade of the University of Cambridge: owning a copy signaled you were a pious Catholic. The book stresses the importance of the sacraments and other orthodoxy, such as oral confession to a priest and the transubstantiation of Christ\u2019s body and blood when taking communion.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a hugely popular work of English prose in the 15th century, and the reason it\u2019s so important is because it\u2019s right on the fulcrum of orthodox and heterodox belief,\u201d Wade says. \u201cIt becomes a lightning rod for judging whether someone is a heretic or not.\u201d<\/p>\n
If you’re enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing<\/a>. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.<\/p>\n Enter John Gage, an aristocrat who served Henry VIII. Among Gage\u2019s jobs at Henry\u2019s court was taking stock of monasteries and either turning their possessions over to the Crown or destroying them, as the king sought to both increase his wealth and assert himself<\/a> as leader of the Church of England.<\/p>\n Gage himself was a devout Catholic. So when he came across a copy of Mirror,<\/i> he didn\u2019t destroy it. At the time, owners would sign their books\u2014they were pricey pieces of property\u2014and as evidenced by his signature, Gage decided to keep this one for himself. It remained in his family\u2019s possession until 1976, when a distant descendant sold the book at auction to Japanese professor and rare book collector Toshiyuki Takamiya. When Takamiya gave his book collection to Yale University\u2019s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Mirrors <\/i>was included, and it was later digitized.<\/p>\n But the manuscript was incomplete. Now six missing pages, which touched on Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, have been found.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not entirely clear how the lost pages got separated from the rest of the book. What is known is that the stitches that bound the pages came loose at some point and that the pages were left out when the book was mended.<\/p>\n The loose leaves ended up in a collection of Gage family estate records and passed through several sets of hands before they ended up at an archive called the Keep based in Brighton, England. No one there realized exactly what they had in their possession\u2014a missing piece of important British history essentially hiding in plain sight\u2014until Wade and Katie Walter of the University of Sussex started to suspect the two texts had originally been one.<\/p>\n