A psalter damaged in a fire in 1731 has given up forty lines of lost text to the Centre for Manuscript Studies.
The psalter came to Aldermere in 1902, its edges charred and a third of its pages unreadable. Using multispectral imaging, researchers photographed each page under fourteen wavelengths of light and combined the images to recover ink that the fire had turned invisible.
Among the recovered text is a prayer in the margin, added by a later owner, asking for "a dry roof and a quiet winter". The images are freely available in the college's digital library.
