A medieval missive crossed centuries and continents before University of Toronto researchers made a royal discovery: it was a decree from France's notorious "Spider King."
U of T's Old Books New Science (OBNS) Lab has identified the faded strip of parchment as part of a 15th-century legal letter from the court of Louis XI, whose web of political intrigue earned him his arachnid moniker.
The fragment has been held in the Robertson Davies Library at Massey College - an independent charitable college on U of T's downtown campus - as part of a 2017 donation from William Rueter, founder of Aliquando Press.
The identification was a collaborative effort, drawing on the expertise of researchers and librarians using specialized imaging technology available through the Andrews Project for Book Science at U of T's Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library.
OBNS head of research Jessica Lockhart and Chana Algarvio, a U of T doctoral student and assistant librarian at Massey College, took a closer look at the fragment and brought it to Fisher for analysis.
Medievalist Sebastian Sobecki was able to pinpoint the document's precise legal French to the regional Parliament of Toulouse - and, crucially, identify the telltale fold pattern that confirmed its royal provenance.
"These lettres patente - these government instruments - were really important to the making of the modern French bureaucracy," says Sobecki, a professor in the department of English and Centre for Medieval Studies in the Faculty of Arts & Science.
"And it was a unified system that worked - and was foundational to the Napoleonic code, on which Quebec's law is based. So you could say many of Louis XI's policies form the DNA of Quebec's law code, and Canadian law."
OBSN founder Alexandra Gillespie, U of T vice-president and principal of U of T Mississauga, says the find is a triumph of interdisciplinary research.
"It's the sort of discovery that has required everything from the expertise of medieval literature scholars to cutting-edge scanning technology - and it could only happen at a place like the University of Toronto."
