4 hours ago
(6 hours ago)mykiavellian Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Are these off-cuts?
They do look like that. Many bifolios have holes, irregular edges, half-width flaps, wrinkles, sewed-up tears...
Quote:Could they be from someone who is preparing or selling or storing parchment for other, more conventional purposes, that is skimming the worst of their stock for this manuscript?
I don't think any writer, no matter how poor or isolated, would make his own parchment. Conversely, I don't think parchment makers would write books.
A parchment maker surely would sell the off-cuts and defective sheets for a discount, rather than throw them away. The Author must have bought the cheapest barely-usable sheets he found. Maybe even got them for free from others who bought vellum sheets in bulk and had to put aside the bad ones.
Quote:Are there differences in the quality between folios?
It seems so on the scans. Some folios -- like this one, f102, f114, and several others -- ran into big holes or edges of the hide. That is also the case of f112, and moreover there is on that folio an area 2-3 cm wide near that defect where the vellum surface was badly treated, so that the ink would spread out as if the vellum was blotting paper. There are folios with major wrinkles, that the Scribe had to avoid (showing that they did not develop later but were already there in the bank vellum).
Quote:If so, can we conclude that different scribes sourced parchment differently?
The vellum was probably procured by the Author, not the Scribe(s); and I see no evidence suggesting that there was more than one Author. But there may be differences of overall quality from section to section; I don't know. Maybe someone looked into that already.
Quote:I have heard it said that the text is unusual for lacking obvious scrape marks as evidence of correction ... could this be because ... the ink they used was easy to wipe off?
I see lots of instances of errors by the Scribe; some were corrected by just overwriting, some were not corrected. But only iron-gall ink requires scraping. The ink of the VMS can be washed off completely with water (as shown by the "ketchup" stain on f103r). So perhaps many errors were corrected by using a wet "Q-tip" as an eraser.
Quote:could this be because [...] they simply did not notice mistakes
I like to entertain the idea that the Author was already old when he decided to put his notes to vellum, and had poor eyesight, so he could not check what the Scribe wrote.
All the best, --stolfi