I was reading "Hamlet" by William Shakespeare and in the introduction there was a sentence which was:
Shakespeare made it resonate with the most fundamental themes and problems of the Renaissance - a vast cultural phenomenon that began in the fifteenth-century Italy with the recovery of classical Greek and Latin texts that had been lost to the middle ages.
I think that there must be "in" instead of "to" in the sentence. Am I right?
"Lost to [time period]" or "lost to history" is a common idiom, according to this source:
to be lost to the ages means that something has been forgotten over time
Therefore, over many years during the Middle Ages, the Greek and Latin texts were "forgotten". This does not imply that someone literally lost them, but rather that people lost interest in them, did not tell their children/younger generations about the texts, etc. This has a more "passive" feel to the verb "lost".
Changing "to" to "in" would change the meaning as to someone literally misplacing the texts (all at once or at different times) during the Middle Ages. This has a more "active" feel to the verb "lost"
