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

A trove of books written by medieval-era French monks were bound with bizarre “hairy” covers from far-away animals — shedding ...

At the end of the ninth century, a group of Roman Catholic monks in France struck out on their own. Dissatisfied with the rules of the Benedictine abbey they called home, they created the Cistercian ...

An international team of archaeologists, bioinformatic specialists, and historians has discovered that many medieval books ...

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, analysis of the covers reveals the distant lands — and animals — where ... to examine seven skin bindings and conducted genetic analysis on another nine books, according to the study.