Could a chemist reproduce inks of medieval quality, then apply them to vellum?

[Jorge_Stolfi]

It’s a typical iron gall ink.

How do you know that the manuscript you showed is in iron-gall ink?

See pages You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and 116v. If it weren’t, you probably wouldn’t be able to see anything at all. ...If the VM had been written in a non-iron-based ink, it would look something like this.

It would look like the red writing on zillions of medieval manuscripts, or like the blue and red writing on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..  Or like the red ink on f67r2.  Only brown.

This is exactly the kind of abrasion Crowe was looking for, but didn’t find. Not every ink contains soot and gum arabic to make it appear a beautiful black. Once the gum arabic has become brittle with age, the writing crumbles too.
Is that clear?

Not at all.  Lots of problems with this sentence. 

By "Crowe" You mean McCrone? They found iron in the ink, but none of their instruments could tell the difference between iron-gall and a watercolor-like ink with ocher pigment.  They did not look for "abrasion".

Iron-gall ink is not supposed to contain soot. The black color is intrinsic, due to a polymer of tannin and iron(III) that forms relatively quickly once the fresh ink is exposed to air.

Gum arabic will soften and dissolve in water, and will be consumed by mold and insects over time.  It is not the gum arabic that holds the iron-gall ink to the vellum, but the tannin that binds chemically to the protein in the hide.  That is why iron-gall ink is waterproof and won't crumble or flake off.  And that is why it was normally used to write on vellum.

Did you know that for 20,000 years, right back to ancient times, the recipe hasn’t really changed at all?
Saliva/water, fruit juice/sugar and charcoal.

Actually ink recipes have been much more varied than that.  For instance, the black "india" ink, best suited for paper and papyrus, is not made from charcoal (too coarse) but from lampblack (soot), obtained by burning some fatty fuel and collecting putting some cold surface into the black smoke.

All the best, --stolfi