Created in Northumbria in the eighth century, this copy of the Epistles of St Paul is among the oldest books held in the Trinity College Cambridge Library.
Credit: Reproduced with kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge
Medieval parchment preserved two histories: the words written by scribes and the DNA of a sheep virus that had circulated for thousands of years.
Animal skins used to make historic manuscripts have revealed the 3,500-year history of the sheep pox virus (SPPV). By recovering viral DNA from parchment, researchers traced the pathogen across Bronze Age Eurasia and medieval Europe, turning celebrated documents such as the York Gospels into unexpected records of animal health.
The international project, led by University College Dublin, brought together geneticists, historians, virologists, protein chemists, and conservators. Their findings provide the first genetic evidence that sheep pox was affecting European flocks centuries before modern veterinary records began.
A Virus Hidden In Parchment
Sheep pox is a highly contagious disease that can spread quickly through a flock. It is especially dangerous to young animals and can cause high death rates while reducing the production of wool, meat, and milk.
Parchment was commonly made from processed sheep, goat, or cattle hides. Although the manufacturing process removed most visible signs of the animal, fragments of its DNA and traces of pathogens could remain trapped in the material. Each surviving page can therefore preserve information about the animal from which it was made.
Credit: Reproduced with kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge
“The recording of ancient DNA of pathogens has completely changed our understanding of infectious disease in the past, and here we show that parchment can also preserve animal pathogen DNA. It is possible that archives and libraries around the world also contain the genetic traces of disease outbreaks in animals in the past,” said Louis L’Hôte, a UCD PhD candidate and the study’s lead author.
“These genomes help us understand how these pathogens evolved and how they impacted past societies, such as sheep pox virus, which we show has been affecting Eurasian sheep herds for at least three and a half millennia.”
Historic Manuscripts Reveal Infected Flocks
In the study, published in Science Advances, the researchers reconstructed more than 3,500 years of sheep pox virus evolution. They identified its DNA in several medieval manuscripts, including documents with considerable historical importance.
One was the 1,000-year-old York Gospels, among the finest illuminated manuscripts to survive from the early Anglo-Saxon period. The researchers also examined the Corpus Glossary at Corpus Christi College Cambridge, one of the earliest English dictionaries, and other medieval works from Britain and continental Europe.
Several pages within the same manuscripts carried sheep pox virus DNA. That pattern suggests the books were assembled using hides from multiple infected animals and raises the possibility that their pages captured evidence of outbreaks affecting entire flocks.
The discovery shows that manuscripts can reveal more than intellectual and artistic history. Because livestock were central to medieval farming, clothing, food production, and trade, the diseases recorded in parchment may also offer clues about the economic pressures faced by past communities.
Unexpected DNA on Goat and Cattle Skins
One particularly surprising result was the detection of sheep pox virus on parchment identified as calfskin and goatskin. These findings could represent rare cross-species infections, although the researchers said contamination during the parchment-making process is another possible explanation.
“Parchment making has been considered a vanishing craft, but we are beginning to understand just how much of the past it has retained. This project shows that parchments not only preserve our cultural history for hundreds of years, but also the landscape of disease in our livestock in the medieval period,” said Dr. Kevin G. Daly, an associate professor at the UCD School of Agriculture and Food Science and the study’s supervising author.
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