William Noel
Expert on medieval illuminated psalters who oversaw a project to decipher lost works by Archimedes
WILLIAM NOEL, who has died aged 58 from injuries sustained during a traffic accident, was an eminent scholar of medieval manuscripts best known for directing a project in which the latest technology was used to decipher lost works of Archimedes of Syracuse, the Greek mathematician and inventor who lived in the third century BC.
British-born and educated, Noel spent most of his career in the United States where he served as Curator of Manuscripts and Rare Books at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Founding Director of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, and subsequently Associate University Librarian for Special Collections at Princeton University.
What became known as the Archimedes Palimpsest Project began in 1998 when an ancient and extremely tatty 174-page book called The Archimedes Codex was bought for $2.2 million at Christie’s, New York, by an anonymous collector.
The book was a palimpsest (a manuscript on which later writing has been superimposed on effaced earlier writing), much of which had already been transcribed in 1906. Most scholars assumed it contained nothing new, but the buyer sent it to the Walters Art Museum to be restored, conserved and probed for its content.
What arrived was a torn and worm-eaten clump of parchment, charred at the edges, covered with mould, water stains and centuries-old drippings from wax candles, and rendered brittle with old carpenter’s glue. When Noel first examined the book he had to stop when the pages began to fall apart.
It had originally been a 10th-century Byzantine Greek copy of works by Archimedes and other authors. However, the manuscript had been washed and scraped down by a 13th-century medieval monk and written over with prayers. Only ghostly traces of the original remained, and due to the efforts of a 20th-century forger who had placed Byzantine-style religious images in the manuscript in an effort to increase its value, much of the original text was thought to be lost forever.
During a major restoration project headed by Noel, it took four years just to remove the glue and open the book sufficiently to allow experts to examine its contents. Then, with the help of high-tech tools – including x-rays from a particle accelerator – they began to read it, some technologies being invented as they worked.
“It was an extraordinary adventure to read the thoughts of a guy who lived over 2,000 years ago,” recalled Noel. “In the field of old books nothing gets more romantic than that.”
The findings enhanced Archimedes’s status as one of the world’s greatest scientists and mathematicians. The palimpsest contained the only known copy of his The Method of Mechanical Theorems, and it was only thanks to modern hi-tech analysis that scholars discovered that Archimedes had treated infinity as a number, a philosophical leap to a crucial concept of mathematics that would not be replicated until the 17th century.
Another major discovery was an Archimedes treatise about the Stomachion, an ancient game involving 14 pieces of various shapes that fit into a square in different combinations, in which the ancient Greek sought to determine how many different combinations were possible.
It took modern scholars six weeks to determine that the answer that Archimedes gave – 17,152 – was the correct one. The calculations involved anticipated the modern field of combinatorics, a type of mathematics frequently used in computer coding and game theory.
In 2008 a digital version of The Archimedes Codex was released on the internet and Noel went on to become a leading champion of promoting digital access to rare manuscripts and finding ways to make them more accessible to scholars and the general public. In 2013 he was recognised as a White House Open Science Champion of Change.
“We’ve taken something expensive, fragile, inaccessible and unknown,” he said in 2011, “and made it available for free to anyone from their desktop... The rewriting of history is a fabulously wonderful and romantic thing.”
The second of three children of Henry Noel, a businessman, and Helen, née Hutchison, daughter of the Scottish portrait and landscape painter Sir William Oliphant Hutchison, William Gerard Noel was born on August 1 1965 and brought up at Frintonon-sea, where he acquired a love of sailing.
But it was medieval history that really grabbed his imagination. “I was one of those people who found their passion early,” he recalled. “When I was about six, my Dad gave me a book called The Nursery History of England. It started out with ‘Little Men and Big Beasts,’ and it ended with Queen Victoria... I got bored when the book reached 1381, the date of the Peasants’ Revolt. I just read the beginning, with pictures of Alfred the Great and King Canute and King Harold and the Battle of Hastings, over and over again. I was hooked.”
His life path was confirmed at Marlborough College, where “my history teacher was sublime; my science teachers were terrible”. It was only when he began work on The Archimedes Codex that he discovered that “science – ancient and modern – was actually incredibly cool.”
After graduating in History of Art from Downing College, Cambridge, Noel went on to take a PHD in 1992 under Professor George Henderson, his research focussing on Anglo-saxon and Romanesque psalter illustration. After three years as a British Academy post-doctoral research fellow he moved to the Walters Art Museum, which boasted a fabulous collection of illuminated medieval manuscripts.
He recalled that when the owner of The Archimedes Codex insisted that the Palimpsest Project publish the raw data they were unearthing on the Internet, he thought it a “nutty idea”. However the experience “fundamentally transformed me as a curator of rare materials” and he went on to digitise other illuminated manuscripts in his care and present them on the Internet.
Noel held a number of posts at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries and in 2020 was appointed to his position at Princeton where, among other things, he led the digitisation of some 1,700 codices from the Islamic world.
Noel wrote or edited several studies dealing with medieval manuscripts and their illumination. The Archimedes Codex: How a Medieval Prayer Book Is Revealing the True Genius of Antiquity’s Greatest Scientist (2008, co-authored with Reviel Netz of Stanford University) was a history of the palimpsest and an account of the work done on it over the first ten years of the project. In 2012 he gave a TED talk on “Revealing the lost codex of Archimedes,” which has been viewed by more than a million people.
Tall, slim and bespectacled, Noel wore his learning lightly and was quick to see the humour in situations. He was intensely loyal to his many friends, his family and a diverse community of colleagues, including from his Cambridge days, always making time for them, and staying in touch and trying to visit on frequent trips back to the UK.
In 2019 he gave the Sandars Lectures in Bibliography at Cambridge University Library on the topic of “The Medieval Manuscript and Its Digital Image”.
It was on a visit to Edinburgh that Noel was struck by a van on April 10. He was taken to the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary where he died 19 days later.
He is survived by his wife Lynn Ransom, also an expert on medieval manuscripts, and by their son Henry.
William Noel, born August 1 1965, died April 29 2024