So that's one of the reasons I took these five cases from, I start with 1870 with the war between France and the German states, the so-called Franco-Prussian War. And I run through to some examples from the Second World War. And in all cases, they're from different countries, I discuss the losses, what we lost on that day. In

your research, have you found a common thread in the worst causes of destruction to medieval documents? I've

actually found several things that you can discuss in common between all those cases. The first thing I think about is how did that material come to be where it was? And if you look at these cases, they are mainly cases where the modern state has begun to concentrate material, public record offices, national archives, all these things that were founded say from the time of the French Revolution onwards. And that's one thing they all have in common. One of my main case studies is the destruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland. That was destroyed in the opening days of the Irish Civil War in 1922. There was a division between those people opposed to British rule in Ireland. Some people were willing to accept a kind of compromise settlement, and other Irish Republicans thought that was a compromise they weren't prepared to accept. And eventually a civil war broke out between those two parties. And the hardliners occupied a site in the middle of Dublin, and eventually the other side began to it. And it all went up in flames on the 30th of June 1922. And that complex of buildings that had been occupied included the Public Record Office of Ireland. Now, the Public Record Office of Ireland had been founded in 1867, so it hadn't been going for very long, but during that period, 1867 to 1922, there'd been a real campaign to gather and concentrate documents from all over Ireland in that place. And we know what was in there because three years before the explosion, the head of the Public Record Office of Ireland had done a wonderful catalog, little knowing that three years later, he wouldn't have what they had. But it's a guide, of course, to what was there. And so it's a product of the state. And the same can be said of some of the other examples I take. Where had this material come from? The material hadn't been produced in these public record offices and National Archives. It had been produced in the Middle Ages. It had been produced in monasteries. It had been produced in royal courts sometimes. And how would all that material come down to where it was and to where it was vulnerable? So that's one question you could ask straight away. And the other thing I found which was rather slightly more cheerful than that is the fact that after these terrible disasters, an incredible amount of effort has been put in in every case to try and see what can we possibly save from that disaster. Is there anything to save? And that's been done over decades. The Irish case is a very good one because they were coming up for the centenary of the destruction in 2020. In order to concentrate their minds, they launched an enormous international effort, including both the sides of the Irish border and elsewhere, in Britain too, resources to try and see what can be saved from that disaster. They started obviously with if there were any actual fragments, physical fragments. But then they moved on to things like over the course of several hundred years prior to 1922, quite a lot of learned people, antiquarians and archivists had worked on the manuscript material, and they'd made copies of it and described it. So you could go back to that. Ireland was a colony of England, basically, in the Middle Ages. So quite a lot of the documentation that was produced by the Irish government was either sent to England or duplicates were sent to England. So you've got substitutes for some of the things that was destroyed. And a couple of years ago, to commemorate the centenary, this Irish project launched a website which starts with a 3D reconstruction of the public record office of Ireland as it was before the destruction. And you can go inside there, and you can go to any of the shelves and see what was shelved there prior to 1922. And then it leads you to what documents nowadays are the ones that could give you some idea of what was there. A magnificent effort. And something rather similar was done in one other case, a very complicated case. This is the state archive of the Kingdom of Naples. And during the Napoleonic period, when the French basically took over the Kingdom, they founded a public record office, as it were. It was called the archive of the state, the Archivio di Stato. And that was located in Naples, the city of Naples. And it had the most, it's almost ironic, it may be the right word, I don't know, the political situation was so complicated, because the Italians were originally, of course, allies of the Germans. In September 1943, they changed and became, first of all, unconditional surrender. And then they joined with the Americans and the British. It's about the complicated story. The archive in Naples, the city of Naples had been moved, the medieval documents had been moved to a villa about 20 miles away for safekeeping. The threat at that time was American and British bombing of Naples. When this switch occurred, suddenly the Germans in Italy were no longer allies, but enemies. And they began a campaign. There was guerrilla warfare in some cases between Italian opponents and German troops. German troops in the neighborhood of that villa came across it one day. They were very suspicious what they'd found, right? There's crates and crates and crates. And the Italian officials said, well, look, it's only historical documents. This did not stop the Germans from burning the villa. So that all went up in smoke. It wouldn't have been there if it hadn't been evacuated from Allied bombing in Naples. It shows you the kind of complexity of the political situations you get into. But then the people in Naples did exactly what the Irish project did, which is they said, okay, well, these documents have been studied for a long time now. They were studied before the war. And there'll be scholars all over Europe who have notes and transcriptions and copies. And they knew who had come because they had a list of all the people or scholars who'd worked in the archive. So they contexted all these people and from all over Europe and things were sent in. They said these are our transcripts we made. And of course that means really when you say something like, well, what happened in 1285 in the Kingdom of Sicily and what you're looking at might be someone's notes that they made in the archive in 1910 and that is what you've got. You haven't got something from 1285. You've got something from 1910. So it's kind of like saving what there is just by the skin of the teeth sometimes and sometimes of course the stuff has gone forever.

Something that really fascinated me in your book is about the dual role of the modern status curator and destroyer of the records of the past. In comparison to maybe keeping records in monasteries or private collections the wealthy, how have libraries and archives influenced the survival in this way?

Well, as I say, they've had a kind of mixed record because of course putting them into central depositories. They might be national libraries, they might be national archives. In a way, they're being made more available to people. I mean, people who want to do research now, they know what they've got and they've got catalogs and they have controlled environments in which the records are stored. Fabulous, right? The only thing is it makes them very, very vulnerable if there is something goes wrong. And that involves the wars that have been just a feature of European history, right? And that's why I talk about at the end of the book, I talk about the way that nationalism, modern European nationalism is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, nationalism is historical. It says, what is the nation? The nation is always going to be defined partly by its history. So you get all sorts of real interest in national history and publication of documents, publication of chronicles, that's happening at an ever-increasing pace throughout the 19th and 20th century. So it's a wonderful time for historical scholarship, in fact, in the modern world has historical scholarship of a remarkable kind, much of it in its early days, not so much now, but in its early days inspired by nationalism. Nationalism is also the thing that sets European nations at each other's throats. And in all the cases I'm talking about, for example, the destruction of the municipal library in Strasbourg in 1870, that was a war between the German states and France, which has happened, it happened again in 1914, it happened again in 1940. That's a story that's going on, as it were. And in that particular case, there's a sort of little touch because Strasbourg had actually been a German city in the Middle Ages. And then it was annexed by the French in 1681. So when the Germans attack it in 1870, and they're attacking a city that is still largely German speaking, when they destroy the Strasbourg Municipal Library, many of the things they're destroying there are actually monuments to the German medieval past. Strasbourg Municipal Library in 1870 is a book called the Garden of Delights, Hautostelikiarum, which was produced in the late 12th century in a nunnery not far from Strasbourg. And we have pictures of the nuns in it. It's very unusually. Every nun is shown with their name. That's quite unusual, right? And it's produced under the guidance of the abbess, Herod. Herod of Landsberg was the abbess. And you've got this beautiful, beautiful book, which is, you'd have to say, one of the jewels of medieval German book illustration destroyed by German Schelling in 1870. And then there we've got a very, very good example of how work done on those records before the catastrophe is really helpful in filling the gap because it had beautiful illustrations. It had hundreds of illustrations, big illustrations, and we have some copies of those from the 19th century, from prior to the destruction. There's a man with a very memorable name. He's called Count Basterd. That really was his name. And he's French. He's from a noble family down in the south of France, but a poor noble family. He was a military man, but his kind of second string to his bow, something he was really interested in, was illuminated books. And he taught himself printing techniques. He taught himself lithography, which was a new kind of printing technique that had just been invented in the 1790s. And he actually produced not only of the Garden of Delights, but also other beautiful, colored reproductions of medieval illuminated manuscripts. He's the first person really to do this. And he got a lot of support. The French state gave him financial help. He lent some of them to the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. So all those people now who went to the Great Exhibition or purchased one of these copies, could now look at something, a medieval illustration, without having to go to Strasbourg to the library. And then of course, the next step was 1870. Count Bastards lithographs, the printings and copies, that is all we know about the illustrations. Say you're trying to write a history of medieval German book illustration. You can't go to the original, which is now long, it's integrated and gone. You have to go to Count Bastards lithographs. So he's one of the heroes. I have some heroes in this book and the catalogers, archivists, antiquarians, often a lot of, you know, middle-aged men with glasses, you know, these are my heroes.

Can you share with us another story of one of your heroes? Yes, I'll

give you the case of Maurice Gessin. He was an archivist in the area of Chartres, and Chartres is one of my case studies. It was bombed in the lead up to D-Day. There was an airfield there, American bombers went over, and it's a complicated story. But why exactly it happened, we don't know. But they bombed, instead of the airfield, they bombed the center of Chartres, including the library. And hundreds, hundreds of medieval manuscripts were destroyed in that. But the local archivist Maurice Jusulain had been a pioneer of aviation. He was not only an archivist interested in medieval documents and such like, but he actually learned very early on to fly. I'm talking about before the First World War. During the First World War, he was in the French Air Force. But even before the First World War, he had begun to take aerial views, which of course was entirely new. The views of Chartres Cathedral, aerial views of Chartres Cathedral, one of the most important medieval cathedrals in Europe, a beautiful, beautiful cathedral. He's therefore a kind of aviation pioneer, but he's also someone who was very interested in the fate of the manuscripts in Chartres. there you have a very complicated and strange contrast between what was done with the stained glass windows in Chartres Cathedral. These are amongst the most important medieval stained glass windows there are. At the beginning of the Second World War, they were packed up, sent several hundred miles away to the cellars of a castle in the middle of nowhere. So they all survived the war. They all survived the war. The people in charge of the library and the books at first decided, we are going to do something similar. So they got all the medieval books and the more priceless books in the library, and they moved them to a villa about 20 miles away just to be safe. But of course, in 1940, the Germans conquered France. And after a while, the Germans appointed someone who was in charge of the historical and literary monuments of France. They had people in the Wehrmacht who did that. That was their official job. They had a man who was prior to the war, he was a librarian, right? But he's appointed to be in charge. And he says, you don't need to have all those priceless books 20 miles away. Everything's safe now. You've got the German army here to protect you. Life can go back to normal, bring the bookbacks to Scharzer and put them in the library, right? Which is what happened at the end of 1940, where they were a kind of sitting target for the bombing that took place prior to D-Day. But Jusselin had taken photos and photos and photos. He'd taken loads of photos, not only of the Schartzer Cathedral, some of them from the air, as I've mentioned, but also photographs of the manuscripts themselves. And so if you've got a photograph, for example, you can now look at those photographs and you can have an opinion about the script. People have studied the script. What period does that script come from?