Just as it says on the tin title, here are some nice manuscript-related links for you. 🙂
First off, I didn’t know until very recently that there was a Wikipedia entry on manuscript culture, which contains all kinds of manuscript-related bits and pieces (it puts the decline in trade for parchminers circa 1500, for example). However, I have to say that this whole account is constructed around an old-fashioned, rather brutally sequential model of how books linearly took over from manuscripts and thus caused the Renaissance, etc etc, which I don’t buy into even slightly. It seems (from the final section) that this is from the influence of historian Elizabeth Eisenstein: so, as with most things Wikipedian, “interesting, but ingest with caution“.
Secondly, here’s a EU collaborative website telling you (pretty much) everything you need to know about iron gall ink corrosion (yes, really), including chemistry, historical recipes and conservation strategies. There’s also an iron gall ink corrosion discussion list you can subscribe to… for myself, I wasn’t particularly tempted to join, but you might be. 🙂
Thirdly, here’s a nicely detailed page on vellum / parchment manufacture by SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) member Meliora di Curci, part of “The Royal College and Confraternity of Scribes and Illuminators of the Kingdom of Lochac“. All hail King Bran and Queen Lilya!
Fourthly, courtesy of the Department of Medieval Studies at the Central European University in Budapest comes a really rather nice Medieval Manuscript Manual. Though I originally downloaded a PDF version of this from somewhere, the current version is all in HTML: there are also Italian, Russian and (unsurprisingly) Hungarian translations on the same site. What is so pleasant about this is that it floats in a sea of physical terms: brindle, piebald (from which we get “—bald eagle”), wing pinion, barbs, gall wasps, dangling weights on a sloping desk, pumice, gesso, dog’s tooth mounted on a handle, miniver / calaber tail hair clippings, dragons’ (and elephants’!) blood, tumsole, sturgeon’s air bladder… enjoy! 🙂
Iron gall ink such as was used in the VM is made from oak galls, pomegranate fruit, or other plant material containing tannins. I believe, based on some slight experience in phytochemistry (the study of the chemical components of plants), that the species of oak, or other plant such as pomegranate, as it may be, from which the oak galls, or pomegranate fruit etc., was obtained could generally be established by analysing the phytochemicals in the ink. Generally the phytochemical fingerprints of plants are unique to the particular species so identifying the species of oak could narrow down the location where the VM was written. This of course presupposes that the oak gall were obtained locally, but I think that this is likely to be the case with te VM. Traditional iron gall ink has a limited shelf life so it was made as required from the various ingredients (oak galls or another source of plant tannins, a water soluble iron salt, and a vegetable gum such as gum arabic). The plant species used to make the gum could also be similarly established.
I was very surprised to find that nobody seems to have investigated the potential use of the phytochemical fingerprint of iron gall ink to establish the area where a manuscript was written. The purpose of this note is to spur somebody into investigating the method. It isn’t rocket science and is straightforward but I think it would have general applicability.
From memory there are fifteen or so oak species that are native to Europe, and many more found elsewhere and surely it must be useful to be able to narrow down the general area of origin of an iron gall ink manuscript? If I still had access to a Gas Chromatograph – Mass Spectrometer I would do the work myself, but I no longer have the access.
Byron Deveson: that’s a good challenge, thanks. In the case of the confusing (if not confounding or maddening) final page of the VMs, it seems likely to me that there will prove to be at least two (if not three or four) layers of writing / emendations, and the hypothesis that these were done independently would be greatly strengthened if the phytochemical fingerprints of the layers could be (as you propose might be possible) chemically retrieved.
Byron Deveson: I am really glad you mentioned that. I speculated about precisely such kind of techniques; though in a non-specific way as I am not familiar with the precise chemistry. I suppose again it is up to persuading Yale University to allow for the carrying out of such tests. Current scientific techniques and future advances I would have thought could assist in pinning down the geographic location of origin of the Voynich from the different materials that it is composed of.
One thing that I have wondered about, though I would have thought Yale would be reluctant to do it, is if more samples could be taken from the Voynich for the purpose of Carbon dating. I believe 4 samples were taken, but if 12 more were dated we would in all likelihood be able to pin down the dating further and/or determine the time period over which the manuscript was produced. The samples were relatively small, but in the future it may be possible to carry out reliable dating using much smaller samples and so creating very minimal damage to the Voynich as a result of the dating process.
From my perspective more precise dating could potentially support or refute my theory, so it would certainly be of value to me. Though I guess we should be grateful that they allowed the Carbon dating in the first place; I think we can say this has been, it appears, the biggest advance in Voynich research since Wilfred rediscovered the manuscript.