MAKING A MANUSCRIPT

Knowledge of how parchment was made aids deeply in our understanding of its use in the Middle Ages. Understanding its preparation is vital in gaining insight on how medieval people communicated with one another. For the following section, a basic description of how parchment is made will be given, this information is all collected from Introduction to Manuscript Studies, Chapter One, “Writing Supports” and should be referred to for further instruction. 

After a skin is removed from the animal the parchment maker must thoroughly wash and dehair it. The skin was washed in water, then soaked in a lime solution for several days to loosen the hair. Afterwards, the parchment maker would remove the hair, and give the skin a second wash.

Once the skin was prepared, the skin would be dried under tension by stretching it on a wooden frame called a herse, which the skin would be attached to through several evenly spaced cords stretching the skin across it. This is a critical stage in turning the skin to suitable parchment. This process prevented the skin from shrinking as it dried, instead altering the structure of the skin to be thinner, and more laminal.

As the skin was stretched onto the frame, the parchment maker used a crescent-shaped blade called a lunarium or lunellum that would scrape both sides to the desired thickness.

Once the skin was prepared the parchment maker cut it into sheets of parchment. The amount of sheets a skin could give depended on the size of the book they were being cut for, the three main general sizes would be a folio, quarto, and octavo, with folio being the largest folded once to create two leaves or four pages, quarto followed and was folded twice to form four leaves or 8 pages, leaving octavo as the smallest format, folded in half three times making eight leaves or sixteen pages. 

Understanding how a medieval manuscript was bound is crucial for the studying of manuscripts. It reveals information on its history, and production methods, and guides conservation methods by providing insight into its durability and functionality. Between preparing parchment and binding the book, textual and decorative elements were completed. to ensure books were bound in the proper order, the manuscript was arranged into a collection of loose quires. Quires refer to a group of leaves gathered together, and would be the scribes' basic unit of organizing the parchment within a manuscript. Similarly to the ‘Making Parchment’ section, this information comes from Introduction to Manuscript Studies, Chapter Four, “Assembling, Binding, and Storing the Completed Manuscript” and is recommended to be referred to for further information on the subject.

Quires can be organized and ordered multiple ways, one would be through quire numerals, which indicate the position of a quire in a manuscript and are found in the upper margin of the first folio of the quire. Catchwords are another way to insure quires are arranged in a manuscript in the correct order, these are found at the end of gatherings in the lower margins and match the word that begins the text in the first page of the next quire.  

Once quires were organized, they were bound with wooden boards, with endpapers added at the beginning and end for extra protection. The quires would then be sewn onto sewing supports–often made of tawed leather–and then attached on where the spine of the book will cover.

The manuscript was then prepared to receive its front and back covers. Covers were typically made of wood, and would be attached to the free ends of the sewing supports. The inner surface of the boards would be covered with a leaf of parchment called a pastedown. Once this was complete, the wooden boards would receive a tanned or alum-tawed leather cover. Often in the Middle Ages, skins for covers were brightly coloured. Sometimes, they would be further decorated by stamping a design onto it, or with a hot metal tool, this technique is referred to as blind tooling. 

After the manuscript was covered, it might receive one or more clasps to prevent the parchment from curling up and partially opening the book, a common tendency of parchment. There were other tools which could be added depending on the book to make it more useful, or be stored more conveniently, for example, rings might be attached to the binding to make it more portable and allow it to be worn attached to clothing–this would be common for daily books such as a book of hours. Another addition could be metal bosses, which are decorative metal studs to slightly elevate the cover of a manuscript and prevent the leather from wear. A final rare step purely for aesthetics would be treasure binding, and unsurprisingly includes adding gold, silver, or precious gems to a books cover, this was often the case for religious texts.