Revealing Erased Words: The Application of Multispectral Imaging to the Book of Hours 50,1,1 at the Brazilian National Library

Multispectral imaging has become an essential tool for the analysis, documentation, and visualization of cultural heritage materials and objects. This study explores the application of this technique to a 15th-century illuminated manuscript held at the Brazilian National Library (Fundação Biblioteca Nacional) in Rio de Janeiro. The manuscript, currently part of ongoing doctoral research, contains erased text due to censorship through scraping. The use of multispectral imaging, incorporating eleven different wavelengths across UV, visible, and IR spectra, proved highly effective in recovering the erased words "pape" and "thoma", thus confirming the hypothesis of scholar Damião Berge regarding the lacunae and linking the codex to a 16th-century historical event.