Six pages in Brighton fill the gap in a Yale manuscript signed by Henry VIII's dissolution enforcer

A join like this is easier to assert than to demonstrate, and the two halves sat about 3,500 miles apart ^[24]. The case rests on unglamorous measurement. Walter and Wade compared the dimensions of the leaves and of the book, along with the style and colour of the annotations and headers, and found them identical ^[5]. In the Yale volume the gap falls just before a contested passage on the importance of oral confession to a priest, and the scribe's handwriting and the content of the missing passage both fit ^[3]. The six pages themselves cover Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead ^[4].

The match was made on a screen. The two scrolled through the digitized manuscript and found the space where the Brighton pages belonged ^[27]. It was digitized after Toshiyuki Takamiya gave his collection to Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library ^[18].

Walter said the names above the signature point somewhere specific: "The fact that two possible owners before Gage were religious women suggests the manuscript might have been in a monastic house before it came into his possession" ^[8]. How it reached Gage is open. "One possibility is that Gage went to a monastic library and brought it home. Another is that someone else smuggled it out, and it briefly circulated from hand to hand until Gage acquired it," Wade said, adding that Gage "kept it safe when he was meant to destroy books precisely like this one" ^[7]. Gage's duties for Henry VIII included taking stock of monasteries and either turning their possessions over to the Crown or destroying them. Scientific American describes him as a devout Catholic who came across a copy of the Mirror and did not destroy it ^[9][28]. Neither account cites a document ordering the destruction of this particular copy; the study's own wording is that Gage saved the book from likely destruction ^[11].

The risk attached to owning the book changed under Love. He finished his English adaptation of an earlier Latin text around 1409, and it circulated as the safe option. "In the early 15th century, having Bible translations in English could get you killed," Walter said. Love's version, she said, "was considered orthodox and circulated with the seal of approval of Archbishop Arundel, the outspoken opponent of the Lollards" ^[12][14]. A 1401 act had condemned heretics including the Lollards to punishments that could include death by burning ^[13]. Love also appended a treatise arguing for the real presence of the blood and body of Jesus in the sacrament ^[15]. That kind of passage, as Wade puts it, made the work "a lightning rod for judging whether someone is a heretic or not" ^[26].

Wade gives the survival count as "65 copies of Love's text survive today. That's a lot for a 15th-century manuscript, but many could have been destroyed in the Reformation" ^[16]. How many were copied in the 15th century is not known, so 65 measures popularity among the things that lasted and not the scale of what was burned ^[29].

The stitches came loose at some point and the pages were left out when the book was mended ^[19]. "It was known that these pages existed, but they weren't cataloged accurately," Wade said ^[21]. The filing error had stood for nearly a century ^[22]. "All those decisions are above my pay grade," he said of putting the object back together, "but I'm pretty sure that, no, they won't be reconnected." He added: "Yes, this book is incomplete, but now you know where to find what's missing" ^[23].