While the main goal of this book has been to show how the material features of manuscripts can be used to provide insight into medieval written culture, one aspect, the most tangible one even, has not yet been exhausted: the materials from which medieval books were made. The focus in this chapter is on parchment, which is the most telling—culturally speaking—of the two materials used in manuscripts. The great thing about studying parchment manuscripts is that they attack the senses: you can touch and smell them, and hear the crackling sound of their pages. There is also much the material can tell you about the history of a manuscript: like the physician, the book historian can make a diagnosis by carefully observing skin. Good skin, which feels just like velvet and has an even all-over colour, may provide details about the reader. If the expensive kind of parchment was chosen, for example, he or she may have been affluent. Also, such good parchment shows that an experienced parchment-maker and optimal parchment animals were apparently in the reader's vicinity. However, it is material at the lower end of the scale that tells the most powerful and detailed story, shedding light on the book's production and providing clues about its use and storage post-production. Here's the skinny on bad medieval parchment.

Parchment-Maker

The parchment-maker was to blame for many of the imperfections encountered on the medieval page. Preparing parchment was an elaborate but also delicate business (see the General Introduction, pp. 7–8). In order to clear the skin of flesh and hair, it was attached to a wooden frame, tightly like a drum. If the round knife of the parchment-maker (the lunellum) cut too deep during this scraping process, elongated rips or holes would appear. We encounter such holes frequently in medieval books, which suggests that readers were not particularly bothered by them. Many scribes must have shared this sentiment, because they usually simply wrote around a hole (Figure 119). Some even placed a little line around them, playfully, as if to prevent people from falling in (see Figure 103 at pp. 200–1, lower right corner).