Unit 1: Communication and Thought in the Middle Ages
Lecture Notes on the Slides for The Art of Parchment Makers, Scribes, and Illuminators
How to create parchment or vellum:
- Skin a goat or calf. (Sometimes a pig, deer, or even hare or squirrel).
- Wash the skin in clear cold running water for 24 hrs.
- As skin begins to rot, the hair naturally falls out. In hot weather, damp skins can be left in the sun. Usually however, the process is done by soaking the skins in wooden or stone vats in a solution of lime and water for 3 – 10 days (longer in winter, better too long than too short). This is a dirty, smelly process.
- One by one, the wet slippery skins are scooped out and draped hair-side out over a great curve upright shield of wood, called a beam. The parchment-maker stands behind the beam, leaning forward over the top, and scrapes away the hair with a long curved knife with a wooden handle at each end. The hair falls away into a soggy pile at the foot.
- The skin is flipped over and the parchment-maker once again leans over to scrape away the residue of clinging flesh. The maker must be careful not to cut through the skin.
- In the second phase, the skis is actually make into parchment. The skin is dried white stretched taut on a frame. The frame can be hoop-like or rectangular, and the skin is stretched spread-eagle.
- Any small cuts will stretch into holes. Sometimes these are sewn up.
- As it stretches, the maker will pour hot water on it and scrape vigorously using a curved knife with a central handle.
- When it is dry, the scraping and shaving begins again. Fluffy little peelings will fall away. In the Middle Ages, these were boiled up to make glue.
- In the early monastic period of manuscript production, parchment was often quite thick, but by the 13th c it was being planed away to an almost tissue thinness.
I created slides by photographing pages from Medieval Craftsmen: Scribes and Illuminators by Christopher De Hamel, University of Toronto Press, 1992.
Description of the slides:
- A modern parchment-maker stretching the wet skin across a wooden frame and attaching its edges with adjustable pegs. The lamb or calves’ skin would have to have no flaws. White sheep or cows tend to produce white parchment, and the shadowy brown patterns which are aesthetically pleasing may come from brindled cows or piebald goats
- This is a twelfth-century German drawing of a monk preparing parchment which is stretched and pegged into a rectangular frame and then scraped with a curved knife, or lunellum, on a handle.
- A monk inspecting a sheet of parchment which he is buying from a parchment maker, as shown in an initial in thirteenth-century German manuscript. In the background is the craftsman’s curved paring-knife and a skin stretched over its wooden frame.
- A parchment (or vellum) seller’s shop, illustrated in a 15th C. Italian chronicle. One man is trimming the sheets into rectangles and the other is rubbing them down with chalk in preparation for writing. The stock for sale on the shelves includes both rolls and packets of ready-folded sheets.
- Original holes in parchment pages of manuscripts, since many monks could not afford (or did not care for) the luxury of rejecting sheets accidentally damaged in preparation. The scribe here has carefully written his text around a hole in late twelfth-century English manuscript.
- A page from the unfinished Apocalypse (1272). The script has been written on an elaborately ruled grid of guidelines. The illustration has been sketched and the gold inserted and burnished, but colors have not yet been applied.
- The illustration of St. Matthew (12th c) shows the evangelist ruling a manuscript by scoring lines across a double page.
- St. Luke, in a Book of Hours of about 1430, seated at a sloping desk and sharpening his pen by pulling the knife towards himself.
- A scribe cannot write without ink. Miniatures of St. John recording the Book of Revelation sometimes illustrate the legend that the Devil tried to steal the evangelist’s portable inkpot and pencase to prevent him from writing this last book of the Bible.
- Jean Mielot (d. 1472) was a canon of Lille and secretary to two Dukes of Burgundy. He was also a notable translator and scribe. He appears in this celebrated miniature as the ideal scholar-scribe in a study filled with manuscripts and the implements of his labor.
- Professional medieval scribes were required to write in a variety of different scripts as commissioned by the client or as appropriate to the text being copied. This is a rate survival of a 15th C. scribe’s specimen sheet on which he advertised all the scripts he was capable of writing.
- The original owners of this Parisian Book of Hours are shown, with their son, kneeling before their manuscript and gazing up to Heaven to see the Coronation of the Virgin revealed to them in the sky surrounded by saints. This is an idealized portrait in the late style of the Bedford Master, c. 1440.
- An unfinished 15th c Book of Hours. The script was written first, and spaces roughed out for miniatures and illuminated borders which have so far been left blank.
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