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

[Jorge_Stolfi]

And an iron gall ink can fade over time to a more brownish rust-like colour too, so it can be hard to be identify - especially as there are so many possible combinations of ingredients.  So, evidence of iron in a sample is not necessarily evidence of iron gall ink

That is my understanding too.  But I don't know how often and how fast IGI turns brown.  I would quess that it depends of a humid environment so that molds can digest the tannin away.

though the absence of iron can help exclude it.

From what I understand, I think it does exclude it.

McCrone detected iron in the main text ink (although it may have been from the BEEP) and the folio numbers, but did not see any iron in the quire numbers.  Still they concluded that it must have been "low-iron iron-gall ink".  Which makes as much sense as "grape-free Chianti". 

I've seen reference to McCrone quite a bit, but I can't find a source of their actual work - every link I've found is dead. Does anyone have a working link?

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(The "images" subfolder is just the images extracted from the PDF documents.)

Finally, as an aside, I found some ferrous sulphate in a cupboard here yesterday... it's no spooky event, I just remembered I'd used something for dealing with moss in my lawn a few years ago and had half a memory that's what it was.

I have no oak galls, but I do have tea and there's plenty of tannin in that, so I tried making some ink. I didn't want any gum, as I want to be able to use fountain pens. The result is a workable ink which quickly develops a pleasing dark grey shade, and which will presumably darken a bit further with time. I might add a bit of thickener to a small sample (no gum, but I have some honey) to see if that works better with a dip pen. Thanks for the inspiration, folks!

Great!

I don't know how much tannin there is in a tea bag. Maybe you need to make a really strong tea...

All the best, --stolfi