Parchment
Parchment is a writing material made from specially prepared untanned skins of animals—primarily sheep, calves and goats. It has been used as a writing medium in West Asia and Europe for more than two millennia. By 400 AD many of the written works intended for preservation in these regions had been transferred from papyrus to parchment. Vellum is a type of fine-quality parchment made from the skins of young animals such as lambs and young calves.
The generic term animal membrane is sometimes used by libraries and museums that wish to avoid distinguishing between parchment and vellum.
Parchment and vellum
Today the term parchment is often used in non-technical contexts to refer to any animal skin, particularly goat, sheep or cow, that has been scraped or dried under tension. The term originally referred only to the skin of sheep and, occasionally, goats. The equivalent material made from calfskin, which was of finer quality, was known as vellum ; whilst the finest of all was uterine vellum. Many sources believed the starting material for the higher quality was taken from a calf foetus or stillborn calf. Modern research has provided evidence that this was not the case in samples of the 13th century parchment from pocket Bibles. Instead the authors hypothesize that the finer grade was actually the result of some now-lost technique and not fetal hides.Some authorities have sought to observe these distinctions strictly: for example lexicographer Samuel Johnson in 1755 and master calligrapher Edward Johnston in 1906. However when old books and documents are encountered it may be difficult, without scientific analysis, to determine the precise animal origin of a skin, either in terms of its species or in terms of the animal's age. In practice therefore there has long been considerable blurring of the boundaries between the different terms. In 1519 William Horman wrote in his Vulgaria: "That that we upon, and is made of , is called, , , ." In Shakespeare's Hamlet the following exchange occurs:
Lee Ustick, writing in 1936, commented:
It is for these reasons that many modern conservators, librarians and archivists prefer to use either the broader term parchment or the neutral term animal membrane.
History
The word parchment evolved from the name of the city of Pergamon, which was a thriving center of parchment production during the Hellenistic period. The city so dominated the trade that a legend later arose that said that parchment had been invented in Pergamon to replace the use of papyrus, which had become monopolized by the rival city of Alexandria. This account, originating in the writings of Pliny the Elder, is almost assuredly false because parchment had been in use in Anatolia and elsewhere long before the rise of Pergamon.Herodotus mentions writing on skins as common in his time, the 5th century BC; and in his Histories he states that the Ionians of Asia Minor had been accustomed to give the name of skins to books; this word was adapted by Hellenized Jews to describe scrolls. Writing on prepared animal skins had a long history in other cultures outside of the Greeks as well. David Diringer noted that "the first mention of Egyptian documents written on leather goes back to the Fourth Dynasty, but the earliest of such documents extant are: a fragmentary roll of leather of the Sixth Dynasty, unrolled by Dr. H. Ibscher, and preserved in the Cairo Museum; a roll of the Twelfth Dynasty now in Berlin; the mathematical text now in the British Museum ; and a document of the reign of Ramses II." Civilizations such as the Assyrians and the Babylonians most commonly impressed their cuneiform on clay tablets, but they also wrote on parchment from the 6th century BC onward.
By the fourth century AD, in cultures that traditionally used papyrus for writing, parchment began to become the new standard for use in manufacturing important books, and most works which wished to be preserved were eventually moved from papyrus to parchment.
In the later Middle Ages, especially the 15th century, parchment was largely replaced by paper for most uses except luxury manuscripts, some of which were also on paper. New techniques in paper milling allowed it to be much cheaper than parchment; it was made of textile rags and of very high quality. Following the arrival of printing in the later fifteenth century AD, the supply of animal skins for parchment could not keep up with the demands of printers.
File:NLW Penrice and Margam Deeds 204 front.jpg|thumb|left|Latin grant dated 1329, written on fine parchment or vellum, with seal
There was a short period during the introduction of printing where parchment and paper were used at the same time, with parchment the more expensive luxury option, preferred by rich and conservative customers. Although most copies of the Gutenberg Bible are on paper, some were printed on parchment; 12 of the 48 surviving copies, with most incomplete. In 1490, Johannes Trithemius preferred the older methods, because "handwriting placed on parchment will be able to endure a thousand years. But how long will printing last, which is dependent on paper? For if... it lasts for two hundred years that is a long time." In fact, high-quality paper from this period has survived 500 years or more very well, if kept in reasonable library conditions.
Modern use
Parchment continues to be used for ritual or legal reasons. Rabbinic literature traditionally maintains that the institution of employing parchment made of animal hides for the writing of ritual objects, as detailed below. In the United Kingdom, until 2015 Acts of Parliament were printed on vellum, and it is still used for the covers of record copies of Acts.The heyday of parchment use was during the medieval period, but there has been a growing revival of its use among artists since the late 20th century. Although parchment never stopped being used it had ceased to be a primary choice for artists' supports by the end of the 15th century Renaissance. This was partly due to its expense and partly due to its unusual working properties. Parchment consists mostly of collagen. When the water in paint media touches the parchment's surface, the collagen melts slightly, forming a raised bed for the paint, a quality highly prized by some artists.
Parchment is also extremely affected by its environment and changes in humidity, which can cause buckling. Books with parchment pages were bound with strong wooden boards and clamped tightly shut by metal clasps or leather straps; this acted to keep the pages pressed flat despite humidity changes. Such metal fittings continued to be found on books as decorative features even after the use of paper made them unnecessary.
Manufacture
Parchment is prepared from pelt – i.e. wet, unhaired, and limed skin – by drying at ordinary temperatures under tension, most commonly on a wooden frame known as a stretching frame.Skinning, soaking, and dehairing
After a carcass is skinned, the hide is soaked in water for about a day. This removes blood and grime and prepares the skin for a dehairing liquor. The dehairing liquor was originally made of rotted, or fermented, vegetable matter, like beer or other liquors, but by the Middle Ages a dehairing bath included lime. Today, the lime solution is occasionally sharpened by the use of sodium sulfide. The liquor bath would have been in wooden or stone vats and the hides stirred with a long wooden pole to avoid human contact with the alkaline solution. Sometimes the skins would stay in the dehairing bath for eight or more days depending how concentrated and how warm the solution was kept – dehairing could take up to twice as long in winter. The vat was stirred two or three times a day to ensure the solution's deep and uniform penetration. Replacing the lime water bath also sped the process up. However, if the skins were soaked in the liquor too long, they would be weakened and not able to stand the stretching required for parchment.Stretching
After soaking in water to make the skins workable, the skins were placed on a stretching frame. A simple frame with nails would work well in stretching the pelts. The skins could be attached by wrapping small, smooth rocks in the skins with rope or leather strips. Both sides would be left open to the air so they could be scraped with a sharp, semi-lunar knife to remove the last of the hair and get the skin to the right thickness. The skins, which were made almost entirely of collagen, would form a natural glue while drying and once taken off the frame they would keep their form. The stretching aligned the fibres to be more nearly parallel to the surface.Treatments
To make the parchment more aesthetically pleasing or more suitable for the scribes, special treatments were used. According to Reed there were a variety of these treatments. Rubbing pumice powder into the flesh side of parchment while it was still wet on the frame was used to make it smooth and to modify the surface to enable inks to penetrate more deeply. Powders and pastes of calcium compounds were also used to help remove grease so the ink would not run. To make the parchment smooth and white, thin pastes of lime, flour, egg whites and milk were rubbed into the skins.Meliora di Curci in her paper, "The History and Technology of Parchment Making", notes that parchment was not always white. "Cennini, a 15th-century craftsman provides recipes to tint parchment a variety of colours including purple, indigo, green, red and peach." The Early medieval Codex Argenteus and Codex Vercellensis, the Stockholm Codex Aureus and the Codex Brixianus give a range of luxuriously produced manuscripts all on purple vellum, in imitation of Byzantine examples, like the Rossano Gospels, Sinope Gospels and the Vienna Genesis, which at least at one time are believed to have been reserved for Imperial commissions.
Many techniques for parchment repair exist, to restore creased, torn, or incomplete parchments.