Here’s something I’d really love to attend: as part of the upcoming annual meeting of The Bibliographical Society of America at The Grolier Club on Friday 23 January 2009, some papers from the BSA’s New Scholars Program are being presented, one of which is by Timothy L. Stinson (from North Carolina State University) and called “Knowledge of the Flesh: Using DNA Analysis to Unlock Bibliographical Secrets of Medieval Parchment“. Having said that, I might be able to save you the fare to New York: here’s a link to an article that summarizes what Timothy Stinson is doing – basically, he is trying to use vellum DNA as a tool for localising individual manuscripts (rather than have to rely on anything so wobbly & interpretative as palaeography)… once he’s built up a large enough corpus of DNA samples.
This is not hugely far from something I have long thought about (for the Voynich Manuscript). I suspect that DNA comparison of the material used in its bifolios could yield a solid first step towards the original page-order, by reconstructing the likely original quire groupings (there is no obvious reason to think that its quires would have been constructed in anything apart from the conventional manner). Back in 2006, I also used matching skin flaws (along the spine) to predict how one of the original quires was cut from an animal skin – it would fascinating to have a parallel DNA data track to compare this kind of analysis with.
In short, while Stinson is interested in inter-textual DNA comparisons, I’m interested in intra-textual DNA comparisons. However, even though the latter might be the kind of techy humanities project you’d half-expect to pop up somewhere like the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, I don’t actually think it will happen any time soon. Unless you know better…?
Update: Bill Walsh sent in a link to a nice National Geographic story with more technical detail on Stinson’s DNA research. Thanks, Bill – neat! 🙂 And here’s another one from SciAm.
The goat and sheep database is large enough now to tell if the book is made of Long haired screwhorn goats or albino alpine ibex. It can be done in a maner that is undetectable.
Yes, just by looking at it under a microscope of the right kind.
Nick, there’s circumstantial evidence to suggest that the compilation we have now was put together by a student purchasing a copy of one or two sections from larger works at a given time. The practice is attested from Roman times, and in Egypt.
A bookseller would come hawking some scrolls (this from the Alexandrian evidence). People could purchase a whole scroll or codex. But they could also order whatever sections they wanted, in advance, and pay for them also in advance. The pecia system in Europe worked a little like this, though I’ve not looked for information about whether hawkers of books worked that way in later medieval Europe.
I’m looking for information on ‘standard sizes’. Something of the sort existed, but how consistently I don’t know.
Diane: I’m not sure I know enough about the Voynich’s circumstances to know what circumstantial evidence would look like. 😉
Sections in different hands, plainly from different sources, signs of repeated collation and subsequent un-memberment [ 😀 ].
Should have added a reference to the last.
http://www.the-orb.net/encyclop/culture/books/medbook1.html
It does raise some additional questions – enciphering would presumably be more problematic.
That link is to such a long page, I may as well quote the bit I posted to Vms iist (mistyping pecia for pescia – I was thinking about fish!)
.
The system began in about 1200 and ended in about 1350 in the North, and about 1425-50 in the South. It existed in at least eleven universities (seven in Italy, two in France, and one each in Spain and England) and probably many others. The stationer held one or more exact copies (the exemplar) of a text in pieces (hence pecia), usually a gathering of four folios (sixteen columns) or perhaps six folios. Each column had to have a certain number of lines (usually sixty), and each line a certain number of letters (usually thirty). Each exemplar was examined to ensure it was correct, and any exemplar found to be incorrect resulted in a fine for the stationer. Each part was rented out for a specific time (a week at Bologna) so that students, or scribes, could copy them. This way a number of students could be copying parts of the same book at the same time. Stationers were required to rent pieces to anyone who requested them, and the charges were fixed (e.g., at Treviso in 1318 the charges were six pence for copying, and two pence for correcting). The size of books began to decline, and script became more compact and the number of abbreviations increased. The two-column format became the norm, and ornament was almost abandoned on all books with the exception of the luxury trade. Soft cover bindings tended to replace wooden boards, and parchment became progressively thinner as the number of folios per gathering increased.
Richard W. Clement, ‘Medieval and Renaissance Book Production – Manuscript Books’.
excuse length of post.
Diane: “Sections in different hands, plainly from different sources, signs of repeated collation and subsequent un-memberment.”
Well… I think the “hands” differences certainly point to (at least) two distinct writing *phases*, but I’ve long argued that these may well have been the same person writing at different times with different sized quills (perhaps even an eagle quill for the smallest handwriting).
And as for the reordering and dismemberment, I’ve also previously demonstrated that the Voynich had been already shuffled in a fairly haphazard way long before the quire numbers (one of the earliest codicological layers) were added. Which would mean that few (if any) of its non-original owners seem to have had any ability to decipher or decrypt its contents.
Something to think about, anyway. 🙂
600 *pence* would be a very fair price if the Vms were no more than roughly copied extracts from standard Latin or Greek texts, even if copied 150 yrs before.
oh dear, another libellum.
not necessarily – the returned originals might have been so regularly disordered, or returned incomplete that a stationer finally added quire numbers to what he had, as he had it. Or these might be students’ copies gathered and bound when no longer needed or in vogue. Then again, this may be how the Baresch’s hypothetical chap bought them, not necessarily from a university, either considering the maritime matter in them.
All we need to resolve these questions is a quick translation of the written text, isn’t it?
😀
Diane: I now doubt that anyone outside a 15th century monastery or abbey would add quire numbers in the curious style we see in the Voynich, so I’m not really with you & your stationer on this one. 🙂
I was browsing manuscripts the other day and saw some very similar on a much earlier ms. (earlier than 15thC. Stupidly, I didn’t stop to make a note and couldn’t find it when I back looking. Still kicking myself.
Diane: where were looking when you saw it?
I was looking for ‘paragraph space’ examples, but using ‘Medieval Manuscripts Online’ to link to individual collections. I think it may have been Toronto, possibly Brit.Lib. Not worth guessing. If I ever see it again I’ll let you know.