Bibles kill, literally

Well, it’s a possibly.

A study to be published in August’s Journal of Archaeological Science by Danish archaeologists describes how monks engaged in copying biblical and other religious texts may have been poisoned by mercury in a red ink used in illustrating these manuscripts.

Since the monks, who were buried in the cloister walk of the Cistercian Abbey at Øm, did not have these diseases but contained mercury in their bones, scientists believe the monks were either contaminated while preparing and administering medicines, or while writing the artistic letters of incunabula, or pre-1500 A.D. books.

Kaare Lund Rasmussen, a University of Southern Denmark scientist at the Institute of Physics and Chemistry, suspects that ink used in the abbey’s scriptorium was the culprit.

He told Discovery News “it is very human to lick the brush, if one wants to make a fine line.”

Even today “one should really not touch, or much less rub, the parchment pages of an incunabulum,” Lund Rasmussen said, adding that mercury “was used in the first place because cinnabar (a type of mercury) has this bright red, beautiful color.”

Source: Discovery Channel

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