Book Making

Parchment

Parchment is made from the skin of an animal, commonly calf or sheep, but generally anything with skin to which the parchment maker had access. It underwent an extensive process to remove all hair and flesh and to stretch it into a thin and durable writing surface.¹ The quality of the parchment in the Late Medieval Miscellany MSS 01020 is fairly low. In it, one can see remnants of the production process, such as hair follicles and places where the parchment didn’t stretch evenly.

Parchment would be sewn into small booklets called quires, by taking some number of pages and sewing them down the middle, then folding it in half. In MSS 01020, the majority of the nineteen quires are made up of eight leaves, but this varies in the last five: one has sixteen leaves, another has ten, and two have six. Quires were sometimes made to be exactly the right length for a text, but that isn’t the case for MSS 01020. The quires were generally made before writing.

Writing and Decoration

The writing would generally be done by professional scribes, often working together in workshops. Although in some examples of small, practical books, like MSS 01020, the writing would have been done by the owner themselves, it is unlikely to be the case for MSS 01020, as it is written in multiple hands.

There is minimal decoration in MSS 01020, with only some red ink slashes through initial capitals and some poorly executed red flourishes at the tops of some pages.

However, other miscellanies display a much greater degree of illustration and decoration. For example, in the Liturgical Miscellany MS 50, produced later in the fifteenth century, the capitals, though likewise drawn in red ink, are much more elaborate. There are also full sentences highlighted in red ink. And the Opuscula Humanistica MS 315, a miscellany of humanist texts produced in the mid-fifteenth century, has highly elaborate pages with fully illustrated borders and gold leaf, and begins each sentence with a small capital in alternating blue and red ink.

Assembly

All copying would be done on the loose quires. To make sure they went in the right order, scribes would write the first word(s) of the next quire, called a catchword, at the very end of the quire.

Not all miscellanies include catchwords because they were not always intended to be bound together from the start. However, MSS 01020 does include a catchword at the end of each quire. This shows that it was intended to be a single book from the start, and that there was intentionality to the order of the manuscript, even though the contents do not align with the breaks of the quires. It also shows that this manuscript is not missing any pages.

Afterward, the quires would then be sewn into the binding. In this case, because of damage to the cover and spine of the manuscript, the methods of assembly are visible.

Jesse Meyer, “Parchment Production: A Brief Account,” in Scraped, Stroked, and Bound: Materially Engaged Readings of Medieval Manuscripts, ed. Jonathan Wilcox (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 93-96.