Parchment

Creation

The process of transforming animal skins into a suitable writing material as well as the creation of manuscripts were time consuming and laborious endeavors. To begin, the procedure commenced with the killing of an animal by stunning – the act of throwing rocks to slaughter the creature. The carcass was then hung upside down to drain the blood from the veins to make an evenly colored sheet of parchment. Then, the skin would be washed in water and soaked for several days in a bath of lime solution to loosen the hair. Traditional practices remove the hair by placing the skin over a beam of wood, first using their hands to pull out as much hair as they can, before using a curved, two-handled bladed to remove any remaining hair. This process is called scudding. Then, the skin would be washed again in water and left to dry under tension, while stretched on a frame. This was a critical stage in the process to turn the skin into a suitable material for writing. As the skin dried, it sought to shrank. Stretched tightly on the frame, it could not reduce its surface area. The structure of the skin began to change, the fiber network reorganizing itself into thin, highly stressed laminal structure that became permanently set as the skin dried. Parchment making was a physical process that produced a change in the character of the skin, as opposed to the modern chemical process transforming the material.

The sheets of animal skins employed in a manuscript are a reservoir of information, providing insight on the species of animal used and place of origin. Animals such as sheep, calf, and goat were most commonly used as the skins for parchment and in vast quantities. The types of animals used depended on where the manuscript was created. For instance, parchment made from calf and sheep was common in northern European manuscripts, while parchment made from goatskin was widely used in Italy. Furthermore, the color, texture, and distribution of hair follicles are all characteristics which can identify manuscripts employing parchment.

Because the process to create parchment was a taxing and greatly expensive production, defective edges or impurities in the skins were often used in the manuscript and frequently left unrepaired. For example, it is common to find on some leaves of a manuscript holes that already existed in the skin at the time the animal was slaughtered. Such holes vary from tiny insect bites to large holes suggesting a tumor or growth on the skin, or an injury to the animal. The craftsman writing the text of the manuscript was obliged to enter the text around the holes that were already present at the time of writing, often having to divide words due to the labor intensive process of making parchment and the high cost. Furthermore, occasionally the craftsman would embroider the hole what appears to be an attempt to distract the reader from the impurity.

Once the prepared skins had been cut into sheets of parchment, the craftsman would group several sheets together to form a quire, also known as a gathering. The quire was the craftsman basic writing unit throughout the Middle Ages. Quires were created in various sizes, but the most common were quires of eight or ten leaves. This is done by folding four or five sheets in two. In forming the quire, the craftsman would decide whether the hair-side or the flesh side of the sheet would face outward or inward. For a majority of the Middle Ages, craftsman preferred to arrange the leaves so that the outside of the quire was a hair-side. It is easy to recognize the hair-side of a leaf: the leaf is darker due to the presence of hair follicles clustered together.

Before commencing the writing portion, the craftsman would rule the leaves by pricking small holes into the margins of the leaves to follow the horizontal and vertical rulings. Using a quill pen, the craftsman would first write the portions of text that were in plain ink, leaving blank those areas that would later receive colored initials and titles. Clear evidence establishes that titles and initials were entered only after the ink text had been written. If a manuscript was to include a cycle of illustrations, the illustrations would normally be the last element entered, only after text, titles, initials were completed. The higher the status of a manuscript and the richer the patron for whom it was made, the more complex would be the process of its production and the larger the number of techniques and pigment involved. Writing the text of a manuscript required that the craftsman have an exemplar from which to copy, which would usually be prepared on a wax tablet or scrap parchment. The process of copying manuscripts was a grueling and lengthy task, with either monks or craftsmen working in harsh conditions.

Second Section

The production of parchment relied upon an extraordinarily rich social fabric: craftsman, parchmenter, illuminators, farmers, miners, merchants and scholars. It also relied upon a society that consumed books: monks, priests, humanists, and the men and women who made up medieval society. Therefore, manuscripts contain more information than the texts written on them. Thus, I employed this understanding and framework when examining the rare manuscripts, Liber ethicorum Aristotelis [Image 1] and Apparatus super constitutionibus Concilii Viennensis [Image 2]. [Image 1] is bound in blind-stamped dark brown morocco and comprised of seventy-one leaves. The sheets are tinted a yellowish color, with dark areas spread sporadically across the page. At first, this discoloration resembled grime or stains.

Parchment Skins