[split] Line padding, layout, Currier's "groups of letters"...

[arca_libraria]

damages in the vellum

Dear all, this is not a rhetorical question: What most likely went wrong with the sheet of vellum used to make f112? I'm not being funny here, I look at both sides of that sheet in the hi-res scans, and I could believe there's something not quite right about that skin, but I can't put my finger on what it is.

I think it may have come from a smaller animal and so the uneven edges of the sheet had to be preserved in order to get roughly the right amount of "page". I have attached an image from the Hamburg Bible (Denmark, Kongelige Bibliotek MS. GKS 4 2°, vol. I-III, f. 183v) where you can see a monk negotiating with a parchment seller and holding a sheet of parchment with a wavy edge and a hole. If you folded that sheet in half you would get roughly the shape of f. 112.

Other ways parchment could have that irregular include the parchmenter having difficulty removing that part of the skin from the armpit/legpit and tearing it a bit too much, or the knife slipping as the parchment was cut out of the frame. There's You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. with photographs of the process of making parchment, and you can see that the finished piece has very curved edges. The next step would usually involve trimming the curved edges to make a more regular rectangular sheet, and then preparing several sheets for writing by ruling and folding, but if your original piece is a bit too small, then you have to live with the curved edges.

I don't know how helpful it is for me to give an assessment of the parchment without having seen the MS in person, but to me the VMS parchment (nevermind anything on it!) is quite odd. The parchment is good rather than the bottom end of the market - the sheets are relatively big and they have been prepared well for the most part. There are not many holes and there are very few under-size leaves (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is one). I'm not saying that the VMS is the fanciest parchment available in the early 15th century, but it's also not the cheapest/worst. The large plant section, which has generous margins and blank space, shows that page design was something the scribes and artists were thinking about, rather than cramming everything in as small as possible because of fears of limited writing space.