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About our research project

Medieval Parchment Making: Our Project

A description of our Graduate Student/Faculty Research Award project on “Parchment Making in the Medieval West“

Throughout the Middle Ages, parchment was the primary writing surface for transmission of the written word and was an essential tool for the creation of books, charters, legal documents, historical chronicles, and writing in general.  Made from animal hide, parchment’s durability and resistance to decay make it one of the finest writing surfaces ever invented.  For this reason, parchment and the technologies of parchment production played an indispensable role in the transmission of ancient and medieval texts during their own eras, and in the transmission of those texts to the modern world.  It is not an overstatement to say that without parchment, many of the texts of antiquity and the Middle Ages would now be lost. 

While parchment’s essential role in the transmission of texts is clear, little scholarship has focused on medieval methods of parchment production.  Given an increasing interest in the materiality of the book in recent scholarship, this lacuna is all the more surprising.[1]  We hope to fill this void in scholarship by utilizing medieval descriptions of parchment production to make parchment ourselves.  We will keep detailed records of the process in journals, pictures, and videos.  These materials will appear on this blog so that others can utilize this material in their own teaching and research.

A twelfth-century manual written by a presbyter named Theophilus explains how to make parchment.[2]  To summarize, Theophilus instructs the parchment maker to soak animal hide in a series of lime baths which loosen hair follicles and extraneous layers of skin.  Next, the hide is stretched on a wooden frame until it is tight.  A rounded knife – called a lunellum, or “moon-knife” – is used to scrape the surface of the hide while avoiding punctures and tears.  The hide must be kept moist throughout this stage of the process to prevent tears, as well, and to enable the hide to stretch until it is thin and flat.  Finally, the hide dries while stretched in the sun, and is powdered with chalk.      

Karen Norwood with the vacuum sealed sheep hide.

With Theophilus and other medieval sources as our guides, we intend to recreate this process by making parchment, and we have already begun.[3]  With help from UT associates, we have ethically acquired, vacuum sealed, and frozen a sheep hide. Thanks to the generous support from the Marco Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the UT Department of Animal Science we have secured a laboratory space to work on the hands-on components of the parchment making process. As we make progress with this research project, we will upload updates on the project to this blog for the benefit of students and scholars at UTK and beyond.

[1] See, for example, Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), Pp. 10-12.  While Clemens and Graham give a brief overview of parchment making in the Middle Ages, they do not discuss the process in-depth.  Rather, they follow the majority of scholars in the field by discussing parchment production as a brief precursor to their focal interests in the binding and reading of manuscripts.  One rare exception is R. Reed, Ancient Skins, Parchments, and Leathers (New York: Seminar Press LTD., 1972).  Clemens and Graham make occasional reference to Reed, as do many other scholars, highlighting the unique nature of the book’s content. 

[2] London, British Library, MS Harley 3915, fol. 128r.

[3] Two other medieval descriptions of parchment making are found in Lucca MS, Codex 490 and Conradus de Mure’s De animalium natura.

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Phase I, part 2

After the first set of water and lime baths (part 1), the hide is then removed, rinsed, and scraped to separate all of the wool from the skin (part 2).

Step 5. Next take out the skin for dehairing.

This is perhaps the messiest part of Phase 1. Before removing the hide from the lime bath, we set up a work station for the dehairing process. We placed a large plastic barrel inside the spill basin then covered the floor, the basin, and the barrel with plastic sheets to make for easy clean up.

Next, we removed the lamb’s hide from the lime bath and rinsed it thoroughly with cold water.

We then placed the hide across the barrel, wool-side up.

The moment of truth arrives to determine whether the lime bath was made too strong, not strong enough, or just right.
Luckily, the lime bath seemed to be mixed perfectly (again, we used 2 cups of lime in 15 gallons of cold water).

The wool only had a slight resistance but overall the removal of the wool from the skin was a rather easy and quick process.

Around the edges of the hide and around areas where there were holes in the skin, I found it easiest to simply pull the wool off by hand. Everywhere else I used scraping tools that covered a greater surface area and sped up the dehairing process.

With the hide completely removed of all wool hair, part 2 of Phase 1 is complete.

Next begins part 3, where the now wool-less hide is once again placed into a fresh lime bath to soak and be stirred daily for another 8 days.

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Phase I, part 1

To begin Phase I, we prepared the lamb’s hide for the first series of baths. The lamb’s hide was salted to keep it from going bad in transport, so first we rinsed the hide thoroughly to remove the salt. The hide was also a bit roughly hewn off, so we wanted to cut off the larger pieces of fat and connective tissue on the flesh side before beginning the water and lime baths.

Step 1. Water bath for “a day and a night” (24 hours).

We submerged the lamb’s hide in a water bath using cold water for a full 24 hours.

Step 2. Wash until water runs clear.

We removed the hide from the water bath and rinsed it. The water bath worked quite well in loosening up a lot of the dirt that had been stuck on the wool and we rinsed it thoroughly until the water ran clear as instructed.

Step 3. Make a new bath and “place therein old lime (calcem non recentem) and water mixing well together to form a thick cloudy liquor.” Place skins into the lime bath folding them on the flesh side.

We filled the tank with 15 gallons of water (about 1/3 of the way full) and added 2 cups of the dry powdered agricultural lime until it reached a very cloudy consistency.

We were concerned about Step 3 because at this point the recipe becomes vague. The recipe does not include specific measurements, only a general description of “place therein old lime (calcem non recentem) and water mixing well together to form a thick cloudy liquor.” It was cloudy after one cup but not necessarily thick (we weren’t sure if it meant thick as in opacity or thick as in the density of the liquid) so we added a second cup of lime.

We discussed that if the mixture appeared to be too strong that we might not wait the full eight days as directed and we’ll remove and rinse the hide earlier. If the mixture turned out to not be strong enough, we would simply need to add more lime later and try again.

After mixing the lime bath, we then added the hide carefully to the lime slurry mixture, folding it over on the flesh side (so the wool-side was on the outside).

Step 4. Move the hide with a pole two or three times each day, leaving it for eight days. Twice as long in the winter.

Note: We decided to follow the “summer” time schedule since we are doing the processing of the skin indoors inside a climate controlled laboratory at UT set at 72 degrees Fahrenheit.

For the next eight days one of us came into the lab each day to stir up the lime bath. This part of the process seems necessary in order to agitate the solution and the wool on the hide to make sure the lime slurry can penetrate the thick wool and loosen it. The lime mixture would settle after a few hours, so stirring it helped keep the lime and water from separating.

When we first mixed the lime bath, it was an opaque white color. By the end of the eight days, the lime bath was a murky brownish-yellow color.

Note: Safety first! We continued to wear protective gear for the daily stirring of the lime bath including gloves, goggles, and respirators. Not only do the lime baths smell truly awful throughout this part of the process, but the fumes from the lime are toxic to breathe in. If any of the lime bath makes contact to bare skin it can cause burns and if any gets in one’s eyes it can damage or even blindness.

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Phase I: Description & Schedule

Phase 1 of the Parchment Making Project is dedicated to cleaning the animal hide by removing the hair and any excess tissues attached to the skin. Understandably, this part of the process is often skipped today by people who try their hand at recreating medieval parchment making practices because not only is it time consuming, labor intensive, and required handling of toxic chemicals, but it is also incredibly messy and smelly. We decided to follow the medieval recipe as close as possible in order to observe how this part of the process works and how the details of this process effect various components of the end goal of parchment leaves.

Phase 1 consists of 7 steps which we have divided into 3 parts:

[Part 1]
Step 1. Water bath for “a day and a night” (24 hours)
Step 2. Wash until water runs clear
Step 3. Make a new bath and “place therein old lime (calcem non recentem) and water mixing well together to form a thick cloudy liquor.” Place skins into the lime bath “folding them on the flesh side” (133).
Step 4. Move them with a pole two or three times each day, leaving them for eight days. Twice as long in the winter [*Note: we’re following the “summer” time schedule since we are doing the processing of the skin indoors inside a climate controlled laboratory at UT set at 72 degrees F] (8 days).
[Part 2]
Step 5. Next take out the skin for dehairing.
[Part 3]
Step 6. Dispose of the old bath and repeat the lime bath instructions listed in steps 3 and 4 (8 days).
Step 7. Take the skin out and wash it until water runs clear.
Step 8. Place into another bath with clean water and let sit for 2 days (48 hours).

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Materials

Here are the initial materials to get started on the parchment making project. Not included in this list are the wood frame and stretching materials that will be used during the drying process (Phase II) in a few weeks. As we get ready to begin working with our lamb hide, we wanted to unbox all the materials needed for Phase I of the parchment process which involves a series of water and chemical baths as well as scraping the hide clean of hair and excess tissues.

Materials:

  1. Canvas work aprons
  2. Lab coats
  3. Respirator masks &
    protective eye goggles
  4. Lab gloves
  5. Chalk and chalking tool
  6. Moon knife (lunellum) & other cutting tools
  7. Lime
  8. Lye
  9. Hose
  10. High-temp polypropylene tank with lid
  11. High-temp polypropylene spill basin
  12. Scraping tools
  13. Barrel (which we are using as a substitute for the log mentioned in the recipe that is used as a rounded surface to scrape the hide over)
  14. Plastic tarp (to keep surfaces clean and aid in easy clean up)

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About Us

UTK grad students Karen Norwood & Jason Stubblefield and faculty member Dr. Maura Lafferty

Karen D. Norwood

Karen Norwood is a graduate student in English at UTK in the third year of her PhD in Literature, Criticism, and Textual Studies, specializing in Medieval Literature. Combining literary studies and archival research, Ms. Norwood’s research emerges at the intersection of medieval textual studies and manuscript culture, paleography, codicology, book history and materiality, and ecocriticism. She is primarily interested in the ways the material components of manuscripts affect the production, editorial choices, and artistry of texts as well as the relationship between text, images, and material. Through the lens of ecocriticism, she seeks to understand the relationship between the human and animal and the direct role animals and the landscape play in literary culture and the curation of manuscripts as cultural artifacts.

Ms. Norwood centers her research of medieval texts around the presence of the animal, discussing the encounters that happen between the human and animal, and theorizing the impact of time, material, and species on medieval literary culture. She is interested in what can be learned from the hands-on experience of parchment making and hopes it can result in understanding aspects of problematic surviving texts where the parchment is flawed or has been damaged somewhere in its production or circulation.

Jason Stubblefield

Jason Stubblefield is a graduate student in the History Department at UTK.  He is in the fourth year of his PhD in Medieval and Renaissance History, specializing in the religious history of twelfth-century England.  His research focus regularly requires engagement with manuscripts and material culture.  He is interested in how books were used in medieval English monastic communities, and what extant manuscripts can tell scholars about the life and thought of medieval monks.  Liturgical books are particularly important in this task, since the monastic life is a life of prayer above all else.  He explores how manuscripts’ glossed commentaries, erasures, and additions reflect monastic identity. 

Dr. Maura Lafferty is an Associate Professor and Associate Head in the Department of Classics at UTK specializing in Medieval Latin Language and Literature, Latin Paleography, and Manuscript Culture. While Dr. Lafferty is eager to provide mentorship and supervision over this parchment making research project, she also has a great deal of interest in this project that is relevant to her current professional research and development. She is particularly interested in the relationship of the layout and text to the material aspects of medieval manuscripts as well as understanding the processing and organic composition of parchment. She is currently working on a book titled Rhetoric of the Latin Manuscript Page in which she presents a series of case studies that feature large manuscript plates in color and provides commentary on said plates, discussing the relationship between the paratext and text proper as well as how the paratext changes over time and space. By working with her graduate students on this research project on parchment making she hopes to gain a better understanding of parchment as a physical platform and how the process of parchment making directly affects the constraints placed on the layout of the text. As a professor in Paleography who teaches graduate classes, there are also pedagogical benefits to this project where she not only hopes to gain knowledge in the processes in which parchment is produced but that she may incorporate the findings and results of this research into the classroom and communicate to students interested in paleography, book history, and materiality.