Élodie Lévêque

Elodie Leveque has been working on the examination and preservation of manuscripts, predominantly on parchment, for the past 10 years. She is a Senior Conservator in Trinity College Dublin and previously worked at the Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes (CNRS) in Paris as a research engineer. Her main focus has been on medieval bindings from the Clairvaux collection of manuscripts which, for the past 5 years, she has been examining and describing for the IRHT’s Bibale database, in particular the structures and constitutive materials of medieval bindings from Clairvaux Abbey – including leather and parchment. In that context, she has been working closely with BioArCh in York in the UK, to identify the animal species of leather and parchment from manuscripts.

Élodie has also worked for the National Library of Ireland, Dublin, conserving the Library’s Gaelic manuscripts collection, including the Ormond Deeds collection and the Genealogical Office manuscripts collection. Prior to this, Elodie was a Manuscript Conservator at Montpellier University Library, where she was in charge of caring for the medieval manuscript collection. She is the author of numerous publications about manuscript conservation in international peer-reviewed scientific journals, such as the Journal of Paper Conservation; in addition, she is part of the seminar advisory board for Care and Conservation of Manuscripts (University of Copenhagen). She is a member of the International Council of Museums (Committee for Conservation), and of the International Association of Book and Paper Conservators (IADA).

She graduated from the Sorbonne in 2010 (Masters in Preservation and Conservation of Manuscripts) and is currently a PhD candidate at University Paris X-Nanterre-La Défense, under the supervision of Francois Bougard.

• • Conservation of medieval bindings: 8th-15 c.

  • Conservation of parchment and paper

  • Preventive conservation: pest management, environmental monitoring, handling, etc.

  • Study of the Romanesque bindings from Cistercian collections: materials and structures

  • Study of French Romanesque limp bindings

  • Study of Irish scholars’ manuscripts and their bindings (18-19th C.)

  • Medieval leather production

  • Attendance to parchment making and pigment making workshops

Read a post by Elodie on Hypotheses below