Oxford

THE 360º ANALYSIS OF A PARCHMENT MANUSCRIPT

A symposium to make a '360º' study of a Glossed Gospel of Luke, produced in Canterbury, c. 1120. The idea for the symposium emerged from the “Beasts and Books Project,” a collaboration between researchers at the U. of York, Manchester U., the U. of Pennsylvania and the U. of Virginia, combining archaeo-biology (including collagen and DNA sampling) and codicological, historical and literary analysis to discover what we might learn from working on a single parchment manuscript with every possible means that are now available.

Based on the work of Bruce Barker Benfield, Andrew Honey, Matthew Collins, Jiří Vnouček, Sarah Fiddyment, the symposium explored the paleography and binding of the book and the complicated organization of sheep-, calf-, and goat-skins into quires.