Six pages of medieval 'bestseller' reunited with Henry VIII aide's manuscript
Researchers from the University of Sussex and Cambridge have identified six missing pages of a 15th-century religious text, Nicholas Love's 'Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ,' held in a Brighton archive. The pages, which had been separated from the main manuscript for centuries, were matched to a copy now at Yale University. The discovery highlights how Sir John Gage, a key enforcer of Henry VIII's dissolution of monasteries, secretly preserved Catholic texts despite his official role in destroying them. The finding, published in 'Notes and Queries,' reveals a complex history of book preservation during the English Reformation, challenging the narrative that the period was defined solely by destruction. The pages, which detail the raising of Lazarus, were found in a box deposited in 1929 but omitted from its contents list, remaining 'hidden in plain sight' until recently.
