Medieval Parchment Research Articles

Beyond Repair: Reflections on Late Medieval Parchment Scarf-Joined Repairs

ABSTRACT The permanence of parchment, its salvage-ability and persistence, is demonstrated by the centuries-long tradition of medieval parchment repair. Some conservators of rare books and manuscripts, including Anthony Cains, have recommended parchment be repaired with parchment, paper with paper. This contribution contrasts Cains’s method for parchment repair with late medieval parchment repair techniques. Medieval scarf-joinery, a technique not recommended as modern conservation practice for reasons outlined, ought to be better recognized in medieval manuscripts as interventions that go well beyond repair. With examples ranging in date from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, medieval scarf-joined parchment repairs are appreciated for their invisibility and as sites for embellishment and concealment. By revealing the presence of these repairs, we might better recognize issues affecting a manuscript’s condition while understanding the purposes to which scarf-joinery methods were deployed. As expressions of craft refinement and as evident ‘workmanship of risk’, late medieval scarf-joined parchment repair techniques are appreciated not as ancillary to a manuscript’s production, but as sometimes even central to its original construction.

VOLUMES OF WORTH—DELIMITING THE SAMPLE SIZE FOR RADIOCARBON DATING OF PARCHMENT

ABSTRACTMedieval manuscripts are invaluable archives of the written history of our past. Manuscripts can be dated and localized paleographically, but this method has its limitations. The Fragmenta membranea manuscript collection at the National Library of Finland has proved difficult to date using paleographic methods. Radiocarbon dating has been applied to manuscripts of parchment before, but a systematic protocol for radiocarbon dating of parchment has not been established with a minimally destructive sampling strategy. In this work, we have established a radiocarbon dating procedure for parchments combining a clean-room based chemical pretreatment process, elemental analyzer combustion, automatic graphitization and accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) measurements to reduce the AMS target size from a typical 1 mg of carbon. Prolonged acid treatment resulted in improved dating accuracy, since this is consistent with the manufacturing process of medieval parchment involving a lime bath. Two different combustion processes were compared. The traditional closed tube combustion (CTC) method provided a well-established though labor-intensive way to produce 1 mg AMS targets. The Elemental Analyzer-based process (EA-HASE, Elemental Analyzer Helsinki Adaptive Sample prEparation line), is designed for fast combustion and smaller sample sizes. The EA-HASE process was capable of reproducing the simulated radiocarbon ages of known-age samples with AMS graphite target sizes of 0.3 mg of carbon, corresponding to a 3 mm2 area of a typical medieval parchment. The full potential of the process to go down to as little as 50 μg will be further explored in the future in parallel to studies of sample-specific contamination issues.

“On Golden Tablets”: The Cleveland Museum of Art’s Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Manuscript as a Self-Referential Icon

This article examines the paintings on the five surviving illuminated palm-leaf folios and the interiors of the two wooden covers of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s almost complete Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines, or the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā-sūtra, from the early twelfth century (CMA, Acc. No. 1938.301). Earlier scholarship on the CMA manuscript has overlooked the importance of the first folio, which depicts centrally a female personification of the Prajñāpāramitā text itself. Focusing on the details of the image and comparing it to the other instances of the figure in the manuscript, I argue that the golden image of Prajñāpāramitā on folio 1v serves as the core self-referential icon of the manuscript, alluding to not only the content of the text itself, but also to the very manuscript the image resides in. This essay shows the ways in which South Asian palm-leaf manuscripts can be understood from the purview of materiality, already well established in the scholarship of western European medieval parchment manuscripts.

Simulation of X-ray fluorescence spectra from a medieval parchment with red ink writing

Synchrotron X-ray fluorescence spectra were simulated using the Geant4 software package to quantify the elemental composition of a red ink contained in a medieval parchment. From comparison of the spectra emitted from a blank spot and a spot with the writing we have found that the ink contains significant amounts of lead and mercury. This allowed us to hypothesize that the ink was based on a natural mineral pigment minium with an admixture of cinnabar.

La mise en représentation du «bon gouvernement» : le programme iconographique du Livre juratoire d’Agen (fin XIIIe siècle)

The Livre juratoire (“oath book”) contains the writing of the customs of Agen, that is to say the city’s urban liberties and franchises which were put in writing at the end of the 13th century. Through the 93 sheets of medieval parchment, one discovers the system of administration of the city, which confirms a balance of power between the count and the twelve consuls in the exercise of political prerogatives. Illuminations in the Livre juratoire occupy a very important place in this manuscript. Of its 57 articles, 51 are illuminated with a historiated initial or a miniature. Each of these images depicts the subject matter developed in the chapter it accompanies, according to the information conveyed by the text. From this point on, it would seem that the image maintains a semiological relationship with the text, which is indispensable to the construction of a general political discourse on consular “good government”.

The “Exultet 1” of Bari: multi-methodological approach for the study of a rare medieval parchment roll.

A rare medieval parchment roll, called Exultet 1 (first half of XI Century), preserved in the Diocesan Museum of Capitolo Metropolitano of Bari (Italy) has been studied. Certainly, it is one of the highest literary and artistic expressions ever produced in Bari, one of a kind. It is also the very first among medieval European liturgical rolls, in which miniatures are painted upside-down in respect to the text. To analyse inorganic pigments, a mobile laboratory has been set up at the museum. The techniques used, for a non-invasive and non-destructive in situ analysis, were: VIS-NIR spectrophotometry in reflectance mode with optic fibres (FORS), X-Ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF) and finally µ-Raman spectroscopy. Such multi-methodological approach allowed to acquire many data without causing any stress to the artwork. The mineral pigments have been identified mainly by FORS and they are: red earth and minium, lapis lazuli and azurite, green earth and copper resinate, orpiment and yellow earth. In some areas, traces of a residual gold leaf have been identified by XRF. The presence of rare and precious pigments as lapis lazuli and gold leaf underlines the sacredness and the importance of the parchment. This is the first scientific investigation performed on the Exultet 1 of Bari.

RESTORATION OF RUQYAH COVERS (MANUSCRIPT OF KITAB ALTIBB BY IBN SINA)

Parchment is considered one of the important materials in the manufacture of ancient manuscripts, and the use of parchment spread in the 3rd century AD (Reed 1975), and with people getting used to making parchment and using it in manuscripts, the quality, types and forms of parchment increased, as well as its uses, including manuscript covers. Paper replaced parchment with the 14th and 15th century parchment was given a good packaging material in terms of durability and formality, since with the spread of printing in 1550 AD in Europe and the adoption of paper as a basic material for printing, parchment makers tended to use it as a packaging material that can be drawn on and printed as well. The use of parchment in binding in terms of the arrangement of the binding steps did not differ much from leather as a basic binding material in general, but the parchment reinforcement strips technique, in which parchment was used as supporting strips inside the covers called Laced, were thin strips of thickness affixed to the heel of the manuscript and placed these The strips are inside both covers. This technique was used most of the covers in early medieval parchment scrolls.

The Materiality of Medieval Parchment: A Response to “The Animal Turn”

A new reading of medieval manuscript is being forged by scholars of medieval literature interested in texts that reference and image the animal body. As part of a “post-humanist” project, the parchment book has been interrogated specifically for its place at the intersection of the animal and material “turns.” Medievalists who address questions of animal life and the “parchment ethics” of medieval manuscripts engage primarily with deconstructionist and post-humanist theory and interpretive methodologies of materialist “surface reading.” Yet the literature of the past fifty years on the scientific analysis of parchment and leather manufacture, the conservation treatment and assessment of historical parchment, medieval animal husbandry, and zooarcheology have had little bearing upon these discussions. This essay provides a critique of the “animal turn” as it has addressed the parchment book, by challenging the presumed epistemological identification between the skin of the medieval reader, the animal subject, and the parchment page. A medieval understanding of parchment through texts on pastoral care and allegories of parchment, historical evidence for the animal husbandry of domesticated animals, and nuances in parchment-making based on the investigations of conservators are discussed. And a case study is presented highlighting the Major Laws of Vidal de Canellas, Bishop of Huesca (1237–52), a manuscript in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum containing the Major Laws of the Kingdom of Aragon and dating to c. 1290–1310, after the unification of lands under Jaume I the Conquerer (1213–76), when Merino wool sheep cultivation flourished across the Iberian Peninsula.

Confocal Terahertz Imaging of Ancient Manuscripts

Terahertz imaging has the potential to identify and decipher portions of ancient manuscripts, which may be unreadable at infrared and visible wavelengths. We use a scanning confocal terahertz microscope to scan a medieval parchment with music notes and pentagrams written with different inks. The microscope is based on a continuous-wave solid-state source at 0.3 THz, emitting in the free space with a horn antenna, and a high numerical-aperture ellipsoidal reflector. We present terahertz images with diffraction-limited lateral resolution of approximately 0.5 mm, where the different inks all give similar high contrast. Symbols written on the “verso” side of the parchment, barely glimpsed in the near-infrared photograph, leave a clear imprint in the terahertz images. Artifacts due to imperfect flatness of the parchment are also briefly discussed.

Konserwacja średniowiecznego modlitewnika Wikbolda Dobilsteina ze zbiorów Biblioteki Uniwersyteckiej w Toruniu

In the framework of the project „Conservation of medieval codices for digitization and exhibition purposes” executed in 2011/2012 and funded by The Ministry of Science and Higher Education, the conservation and restoration of medieval parchment book prayer of bishop Wikbold Dobilstein from the collection of the University Library in Toruń was carried out in the Preservation and Restoration Department of the Library.The article contains short description of the results of the scientific researches on the manuscript history, its contents, the life of its founder and owner and the construction of the book.The major part of the article refers to the condition of the book and the process of conservation and restoration treatment, that was successfully carried out without dismounting the manuscript. Such treatment has so far been rather unusual in case of the parchment books, especially so severely deformed and with a unique double-leather binding.

Keywords and Co-Occurrence Patterns in the Voynich Manuscript: An Information-Theoretic Analysis

The Voynich manuscript has remained so far as a mystery for linguists and cryptologists. While the text written on medieval parchment -using an unknown script system- shows basic statistical patterns that bear resemblance to those from real languages, there are features that suggested to some researches that the manuscript was a forgery intended as a hoax. Here we analyse the long-range structure of the manuscript using methods from information theory. We show that the Voynich manuscript presents a complex organization in the distribution of words that is compatible with those found in real language sequences. We are also able to extract some of the most significant semantic word-networks in the text. These results together with some previously known statistical features of the Voynich manuscript, give support to the presence of a genuine message inside the book.

Archaeometry of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Abstract For many years after the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, text analysis and fragment attribution were the main concern of the scholars dealing with them. The uncertain archaeological provenance of a large part of the collection added an additional difficulty to the formidable task of sorting thousands of fragments. After sixty years of scholarly research, the questions of origin, archaeological provenance, and correct attribution of the fragments are still debated. In many cases, material characterization of the scroll writing media delivers answers to these questions. Physical and chemical examination of the skin-based material of the Dead Sea Scrolls started shortly after their discovery. Subsequent studies dedicated to long-term preservation resulted in a respectable body of knowledge about this material, in many ways very different from medieval parchment. A new multi-instrumental approach, developed for an accurate characterization of the highly inhomogeneous “parchment” of the Dead Sea Scrolls, might lead to a reliable reconstruction of their history. This approach is illustrated by the case studies, in which we discuss the specific questions of origin (1QHa), archaeological provenance (11QTa), and post-discovery interventions (1QapGen ar).

Un extrait de livre de changeur de la fin du Moyen Âge

The Public Record of the Département of Loire-Atlantique (Nantes) preserve a four pages medieval parchment (1 J 114) part of the cover of a register dating to the late fifteenthcentury, extracted from a collection of goldsmith’s recipes or from the book of a money-changer. This rather luxury document is divided in two parts concerning gold and silver respectively. It offers some technical indications, one monetary mention and a few metrological data. It is unfortunately only fragmentary, beginning and closing in the middle of a sentence. However, considering the rarity of this type of document, a transcription with comment is proposed in this article.

Knowledge of the Flesh: Using DNA Analysis to Unlock Bibliographical Secrets of Medieval Parchment

Previous articleNext article No AccessKnowledge of the Flesh: Using DNA Analysis to Unlock Bibliographical Secrets of Medieval ParchmentTimothy L. StinsonTimothy L. Stinson Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America Volume 103, Number 4DECEMBER 2009 Published for the Bibliographical Society of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/pbsa.103.4.24293890 Views: 26Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref COPYRIGHT © 2009 THE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICAPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Anna Lisa Taylor Where are the wild things? Animals in western medieval European History, History Compass 16, no.33 (Mar 2018): e12443.https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12443Sarah Kay Legible skins: Animals and the ethics of medieval reading, postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2, no.11 (Mar 2011): 13–32.https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2010.48

Characterization by Ftir of the Effect of Lead White on Some Properties of Proteinaceous Binding Media

Cracking, flaking, and separation of paint films containing lead white from the substrate on medieval parchment manuscripts and other works of art have been frequently reported by conservators. In this study, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) was used to follow up the changes induced by the pigment on some properties of proteinaceous binding media commonly mentioned in medieval treatises. Evidence of the removal of water molecules from the vicinity of the peptide linkage groups c=o and CNH, with a small change in the protein's secondary structure due to aggregation, was obtained. The properties of the lead white–binder samples were compared to those of massicot-containing mixtures. Massicot was also found to promote aggregation of the binders, though it induces a smaller change than does lead white in the hydrogen-bonding characteristics of the peptide CNH group.

Characterization by FTIR of the Effect of Lead White on Some Properties of Proteinaceous Binding Media

Cracking, flaking, and separation of paint films containing lead white from the substrate on medieval parchment manuscripts and other works of art have been frequently reported by conservators. In this study, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) was used to follow up the changes induced by the pigment on some properties of proteinaceous binding media commonly mentioned in medieval treatises. Evidence of the removal of water molecules from the vicinity of the peptide linkage groups c=o and CNH, with a small change in the protein's secondary structure due to aggregation, was obtained. The properties of the lead white–binder samples were compared to those of massicot-containing mixtures. Massicot was also found to promote aggregation of the binders, though it induces a smaller change than does lead white in the hydrogen-bonding characteristics of the peptide CNH group.