The Modern Forgery Hypothesis

[LisaFaginDavis]

Just jumping in to say that I have been working on the question of the number of skins and have landed at only 10 or 11, so roughly in agreement with Rich. You have to use material evidence to establish how the bifolia were laid out and cut from the skin: 2, 4, or 8 per skin, on a grid. And that all depends on where the spinal cord can be seen. If it is in the gutter (that is, the fold of the bifolia), then there must have been only two bifolia per skin (that would be a very young or very small animal, and the poor quality of the parchment suggests an older, tougher animal). If there were four per skin, the spinal cord would be along the upper or lower edge. If eight, the spinal cord would be visible on the outer edges of the bifolia. The third option is the correct one - you can clearly see, for example, the spinal cord as a dark band along the outer edge of folio 4. At any rate, there were at one point 49 standard-sized bifolia (43 currently + six missing); so that's six skins with one left over for the seventh skin. Add another three or four for the nine foldouts, and that gets you to ten or eleven skins.

Like this (just a mockup example, not an actual reconstruction of which bifolia were cut from a single skin):

   

This is an important question because it speaks to the resources of whomever created the manuscript. We have no way of knowing, of course, if the makers of the manuscript purchased processed skins or slaughtered their own animals to prepare the parchment. We also have no way of knowing if any bifolia were lost before the foliation was added. So all we can actually do is estimate the number of skins required for the manuscript in its current state.