Since parchment was expensive, it was commonly scraped down for reuse in the middle ages – texts came and went, but the material remained valuable to bookbinders and scribes. Once the spectrum of images is captured, they are digitally processed, selected, and united to form a single image that pulls out details not visible to the naked eye. Other organic compounds present in pigments and inks, and the resulting images allow conservators and historians to identify certain pigments in manuscript paintings. It is also used to detect the presence of metals or Each wavelength picks picks up different details from the manuscript’s surface, sometimes capturing ink and stains that have penetrated into the surface of the parchment or paper that may be invisible to the naked eye. Spectrum of light captured in multispectral imaging The multispectral imaging process involves photographing the manuscript folios/pages with several different wavelengths of light – from ultraviolet to infrared. With multispectral imagining expert Mike Toth, they photographed over 100 medieval manuscripts at their institutions and added U.Iowa on to their tour! Giselle Simon and Beth Stone of the UI Book Conservation Lab were on hand at the Library’s One Button Studio to handle the books – which included liturgical manuscripts, administrative books, and works of history. The Mellon Foundation is funding the project to support innovative research by CLIR postdoctoral fellows in Data Curation for Medieval Studies Heather Wacha, Erin Connelly and Alberto Campagnolo. This data will provide a new way for researchers, conservators, librarians, and the public to access information concerning the material makeup of medieval manuscripts, their medieval uses, and new approaches for modern studies. The Library of Stains project aims to gather scientific data, drawn from stains found on parchment, paper, and bindings in medieval manuscripts. The project is explained and illustrated here: and states its goals: This info will help us understand how these medieval books were used and by whom. The project aims to create a library of stains found in medieval manuscripts in order to identify some of the smudges, splotches, spots that are so common in well-used 600 year old books. It continued to be used for high end manuscripts, liturgical books, specialized administrative documents – and increasingly for the covers of books in the form of limp, semi-limp and stiff parchment bindings.ĬLIR postdoctoral fellows Erin Connelly, Alberto Campagnolo, Heather Wacha, and multispectral imaging guru Mike TothĪ team of medievalists and multispectral photography specialists visited U.Iowa in December to image some of our medieval manuscripts for their Stains Alive project. Parchment did not disappear in the 16th century. Though papermaking had been made in Europe for centuries, production really ramped up by the early 1500s in an effort to keep up with the demands of early printers.
Parchment was the standard sheet material in Europe until the late 15th c., when it began to compete with paper. Medieval and early modern parchmenters understood their product, and scribes and bookbinders did too.
The parchment used for the outside of a binding was durable and thicker than what you would find on the folios of a fine book of hours for example – and the bookbinders were looking for something durable and generally did not need a blemish-free product. This is often the case with the parchment used for limp and semi-limp covers, and suggests that medieval and early modern parchmenters were selling a range of sheet materials, graded by thickness, color, surface quality, level of defect or irregularity. Here the user didn’t shy away from using the part of the sheet with a sewn repair or a less than perfect sheet.
0 kommentar(er)
