Strange “hairy” covers of books in medieval Europe were made from seal skin obtained from Viking descendants, a new study has ...

The material on the covers of books from a French abbey was too hairy to have come from calves or other local mammals.

A scientific analysis of dozens of 12th- and 13th-century books found in European monasteries reveals they were bound in sealskins procured by Norse traders from as far away as Greenland.

The books hail from Clairvaux Abbey, founded in 1115 by Cistercian monks in northern France, and its daughter monasteries. Some tomes are nearly 900 years old. Researchers had thought they were ...

Now after years of painstaking collaborative work with the university’s Cultural Heritage Imaging Laboratory (CHIL), ...

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