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.      

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.

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[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.