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<\/a>In the first session he stressed the major differences between medieval manuscripts and early printed books, including the obvious:\u00a0 the former are produced one at a time, hand-written and multi-colored; the latter are produced in numbers, mechanically, in black and white; printed books were largely done on paper, and manuscripts on vellum or parchment (the two terms mean the same thing, i.e., any animal skin stretched and scraped clean).\u00a0 According to one scholar, parchment is sheep or goat, and vellum is calf, but most curators, collectors, and dealers are generally\u00a0not expert enough in mammalian dermatology to tell the difference.\u00a0 Not much vellum was purchased before 1150, when only monasteries produced books, but was rather a by-product of eating meat, and plentiful in terms of demand.\u00a0 The first recorded sale in England of vellum is by a vegetarian monastery in 1180, and with the rise of the universities (and thus, demand), purchasing vellum became necessary.\u00a0 Oxford was buying vellum by 1200.\u00a0<\/p>\nThe basic component of manuscript production is the quire \/ signature \/ clutch of parchment–i.e., one skin, folded one or more times to form a gathering, sewn together initially by a tacketing stitch in the upper left hand corner.\u00a0 Quires are written one at a time, and then illuminated in the same fashion (always written first).\u00a0 The illuminator does a rough sketch, draws over the sketch in ink, and then paints over the ink in whatever colors he choses.\u00a0 He works in gold first, and then in the other colors: red (vermillion), blue (lapis lazuli, or azurite), green (verdigris), and yellow (saffron).\u00a0 In terms of ink, most manuscripts are written in iron gall ink, despite many medieval recipes for carbon ink (which was used in printing).\u00a0 Paraphrasing de Hamel, one must be careful in beliving medieval “how-to” guides, in that they tended to describe how things ough<\/strong>t to be done, not necessarily how they were<\/strong> done.<\/p>\n There followed a discussion of mistakes in manuscripts (wrong words, spelling errors, omissions, and additions) and forgeries (mostly a case of an early script with a later illumination–sometimes 20th century!).<\/p>\n The last session of the seminar on this day was a more formal presentation on how to identify and date a manuscript (or a fragment), using the knowledge so far presented, and using sources such as the Patrologia Latina, and websites like CHD Book of Hours (http:\/\/www.chd.dk\/tutor\/<\/a>).\u00a0 We all took a short break, and then attended a public talk (ca. 200 people) by Dr. de Hamel on medieval Bibles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Day 1 \u00a0Born in London, Christopher de Hamel actually grew up in New Zealand, and early on (at 12 or 13) encountered and became fascinated with medieval manuscripts. \u00a0Educated at Oxford, he ended up (by accident he says, but such paths are often so), at Sotheby’s, and for 25 years (according to professor Scott Gwara’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[7],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>De Hamel than gave a necessarily oversimplified overview of scripts in the West, which began with the Roman alphabet in square Capitals (suited to stone inscriptions) and Rustic Capitals (more useful in writing), to Uncial (the script of Christianity), which evolved into Half-Uncial and only survived as an Irish or insular script.\u00a0 On the continent, Roman cursive (a minuscule script), which was the script of administration and bureaucratic communication, morphed over time into the Merovingian Cursive hands (France), Anglo-Saxon Minuscule (England), Visigothic Minuscule (in Spain, to the 11th Century), and Benaventine Minuscule (southern Italy).\u00a0 Humanistic Minuscule, French andEnglish Cursive, Bastard Secretary & Black Letter Cursive were used for various kinds of texts through the end of the seventeenth century.\u00a0 The point to remember that scripts were always merging and diverging, evolving and changing.\u00a0 For a more precise and detailed (but brief, given the subject) account, see Michelle P. Brown’s British Library Guide to Writing and Scripts<\/em> (U. of Toronto, 1998).<\/p>\n