Unit 1: Communication and Thought in the Middle Ages
Creative Activity: Visualizing the Production of Folios
Materials: Oblong sheets of paper colored yellow on one side.
Purpose: To understand the complexities of manuscript production. Manuscripts were created by binding several gatherings of pages. A gathering may consist of one or two sheets of parchment folded several times to create pages. Sometimes the lettering was done before the folding. Thus, one had to understand how the pages would be mapped out. It was also important to keep the coloring of the pages consistent.
The flesh side was is whiter than the grain side, and usually smoother, tending to be convex, naturally curling away. The grain side, where the hair one was, is usually darker in color (creamy or yellower).
The grain side tends to curl in on itself. The cheaper quality parchment curled badly (skin is less elastic). Best quality parchment is scraped to a suede-like feel. The ink does not adhere as well to the shinier grain side. With a magnifying side, one can see the dots where hairs once grew.
Your challenge is to create a manuscript in which all flesh sides face other flesh sides, and all grain sides face grain sides. Solution: folding the parchment into folios.
To make a gathering of pages:
- Lay the paper horizontally on the table with the color side upwards.
- Now fold it over one with a vertical crease in the middle. It looks tall and thin. It is the shape called a folio.
- Now fold it in half again and crease it along the middle horizontally. It is oblong but a bit squatter in shape. This format is called a quarto, because four thicknesses are folded.
- Now fold it in half yet again. The wad is not an eighth of the size that it began, and the shape is called octavo.
- Now stop. With small numbers in the center of each page write the numerals 1 – 16 on each page. This is slightly challenging because of the folds.
- Now open the paper to see in which direction each page is facing. Save this information for the lessons on printmaking with paper. Large sheets of paper would be printed with 16 pages on each sheet. Imagine if you did not get each page facing the right direction, the entire sheet would be useless.
- Imagine this as a gathering in a book, with a central fold and uncut edges like a French novel. Take a knife or straight edge and open it up page by page as if you were reading it. Page 1 is white. Pages 2 and 3 facing each other are colored. Pages 4 and 5 facing each other are white. Pages 6 and 7 are colored, and page 8 is white. Save your octavo (this is a gathering of eight leaves or four bifolia) to help to create your Medieval medical text book.
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