Manuscripts: from skin to page

Rebecca Schleuss, MSt in Modern Languages at University of Oxford, on studying the materials of the book

When you mostly work with editions of texts, it is easy to detach them from their physical containers and forget about their materiality. During an afternoon with Andrew Honey, book conservator at Bodleian Libraries, and Matthew Holford, Tolkien Curator of Medieval Manuscripts at the Bodleian Libraries, we learned that size, material, texture and quality – irrespective of content – can reveal a lot about a manuscript book.

Parchment was used as a writing surface in Europe since the 2nd century, being replaced by paper from the 13th century onwards. To make parchment, the animal skin of calves, sheep or goats first need to be cleaned of hair and skin. For that the skin is soaked in lime solution to loosen the hair and then scraped first with a blunt knife, then with a sharp knife to remove the rest of the skin.

What differentiates parchment from leather, however, is the following step: the skin gets tensioned onto a frame, called a herse, while still wet and is left to dry. A half-circular lunar knife is used on the stretched skin for further smoothness. Afterwards, sheets are cut out of the parchment to utilise as much of the skin as possible – consequently we encounter some pages with irregular edges, cut from the sides of the skin. A careful observer can at times even detect from which part of the animal’s body the piece is from, making out the contours of the spine or darker coloured arm-pits and leg-pits.

As this is a manual process, accidents happen and the knife can pierce the skin during the production process. The animal also might have had wounds which then create round holes on the parchment, expanding as the skin is stretched; these are known as fly-bites. Their shape and how they are treated by parchment-makers and scribes can reveal when these holes appeared. If it happened during the processing of the skin, then it was mostly sewn together again and the ends are closely aligned.

Scribes wrote around or playfully ornamented extant holes, revealing the care taken to accommodate the various qualities of parchment. As Andrew pointed out, both the parchment-makers and later the scriptorium decided whether and how to hide the faults in the sheet of parchment.

MS. Laud Misc. 439, fols. 35v-36r. The structure of the columns accommodates the hole.

The manuscripts brought along for the session wonderfully illustrated this, containing some insightful examples of irregularities and the methods employed to adapt to them. It made apparent that there was a spectrum to how ‘perfect’ a sheet of parchment needed to be: some flaws were carefully erased, others were acceptable to remain and were incorporated into the layout of the page. The manuscripts also bore testimony to the fact that parchment was valuable.

A parchment manuscript could well contain the hides of a whole herd of animals, making them expensive and precious possessions. Consequently, parchment was reused – as seen in MS Laud. Misc. 306, fols. 72v-73r, where the wide margins are used as ‘quarries’ for small pieces of parchment – and could end up in the most wondrous places (in bindings, as covers of books, in hem of dresses, and saint’s crowns).

Even though paper became the main writing surface – surviving to this day (if we don’t count our Word-documents, which we surely don’t) – parchment continued to be utilised. In the MS Huntington 300 a mixed quire can be found that uses both paper and parchment.

This is written on paper… MS. Huntington 300, fol. 144r
… and this on parchment! MS. Huntington 300, fol. 143v

Re-blogged from the History of the Book blog: read more here….

Codicology in the Weston: A whodunit through the Ages – History of the Book (ox.ac.uk)