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ABSTRACT
Compiled around the turn of the eighth century, in the Wearmouth-Jarrow monastery in Northumbria, the Codex Amiatinus is the oldest complete Vulgate translation that remains extant in one volume. Today, this manuscript remains awe-inspiring, not only because of its size, but also because of the number of animal skins that were necessary for its production. The Codex Amiatinus is now located in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence. It is the only one of the three codices, together known as Ceolfrid’s bibles, to survive. My research combines visual analyses of parchment with knowledge obtained from experimental parchment-making. While scholars have thus far thought that all three of Ceolfrid’s bibles were composed on calf skin, I argue that the Codex Amiatinus’s text block is composed only of goat and sheep skins, while the surviving folia from the other two bibles are made from calf parchment. My study of the parchment of the Codex Amiatinus and the fragments of Ceolfrid’s other bibles raises several questions about the production of these manuscripts: is it possible that the scriptorium of the twin monasteries in Wearmouth-Jarrow was able to produce parchment from local skins in a specific Italian style? Or was the Codex Amiatinus’s parchment imported from Italy?
ZUSAMMENFASSUNG
Der Codex Amiatinus stammt aus der Zeit um die Wende des 8. Jahrhunderts und ist die älteste vollständige Übersetzung der Vulgata, die noch erhalten ist. Dieses Manuskript ist bis heute beeindruckend, nicht nur wegen seiner Größe, sondern auch wegen der Anzahl der Tierhäute, die für seine Herstellung erforderlich waren. Der Codex Amiatinus befindet sich heute in der Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florenz. Es ist das einzige, erhaltene Exemplar der drei Codices, die zusammen als Ceolfrids Bibeln bekannt sind. Meine Forschung kombiniert visuelle Analysen von Pergament mit Erkenntnissen aus der experimentellen Herstellung von Pergament. Während Gelehrte bisher angenommen haben, dass alle drei Bibeln Ceolfrids aus Kalbshäuten bestehen, argumentiere ich, dass der Textblock des Codex Amiatinus nur aus Ziegen- und Schafsfellen besteht, während die erhaltenen Blätter aus den beiden anderen Bibeln aus Kalbspergament gefertigt wurden. Meine Untersuchung des Pergaments des Codex Amiatinus und der Fragmente von Ceolfrids anderen Bibeln wirft mehrere Fragen zur Herstellung dieser Manuskripte auf: ist es möglich, dass das Skriptorium der Zwillingsklöster in Wearmouth-Jarrow Pergament aus lokalen Häuten in einem bestimmten italienischen Stil herstellen konnte? Oder wurde das Pergament des Codex Amiatinus aus Italien importiert?
Acknowledgements
The author of this article would like to express his greatest thanks to Dotta.ssa I. Giovanna Rao, former director of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence for the possibility to study the Codex Amiatinus, Prof. Mauro Mussolin for his support of this research and Adéla Ružičková for her kind assistance during the survey of the manuscript. Access to all extant leaves of the other Ceolfrith Bibles was generously granted by Dr. Scot McKendrick, the Head of the Western Heritage Collection at the British Library and by Dr. Kathleen Doyle, Lead Curator of the Illuminated Manuscripts. Many thanks also to the Imaging Scientist, Dr. Christina Duffy, for her kind help with the microscopic observation of the parchment folia and for providing microscopic images. I would also like to thank the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, in Florence, Italy (Courtesy of MiBACT) and the National Trust in England for allowing me to publish the photographs that I took during my research. If not specified otherwise all photographs and graphics were made by the author of the article. Special thanks also goes to Dr. Sarah Fiddyment for her consultation on the results of visual analyses of parchment and Dr. Gillian Fellows-Jensen for the correction of English text of this article and the editors of this publication for their patience in my delivery of the corrected version of this article.
Notes
1 The exception is the full-page illustration of Christ in Majesty on folio 796v in front of the New Testament.
2 On the Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow, see Grocock & Wood (Citation2013a).
3 On the Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow, see Grocock & Wood (Citation2013b).
4 It was Giovanni Batista de Rossi who deciphered the original names underneath the forgery and revealed Ceolfrith’s dedication on the first page and F.J. A. Hort who realized that the text of the dedication page matches the transcription described in the anonymous Life of Ceolfrith (Higgs & Jarman, Citation1887).
5 In these studies, attention was mostly paid to the history of the manuscript, palaeographical analyses of the script and the art historical description with a special focus on the illuminated folia of the first quire. (Previous research, and the list of existing literature, is well summarized in Chazelle, Citation2019).
6 The Jarrow Lecture was held by Bruce-Mitford in 1967. The dates leads us to assume that, as he mentions that R. Powell had returned from Florence, Powell had been visiting the city as one of the English conservation specialists who helped to rescue the library collection after the devastating flood there in 1966. Therefore it might be expected that the visit to the Laurenziana library in Florence was organized more as a kind gesture by the librarians to display manuscript treasures in this library which had luckily survived the flood unharmed (since they were on the first floor) to important people from the international team of conservators, rather than that there had been a chance in the hectic days in Florence to focus on the examination of one specific manuscript.
7 For example, in the appendix of the printed facsimile of the Durham Gospels. Powell noticed that in this rather typical Insular manuscript, which is mostly formed from thick calf parchment, there are also included several thinner folia from a different type of parchment which he identified as sheep parchment (Powell, Citation1980).
8 The production of modern parchment-makers is limited to a relatively small variety of types of parchment and therefore experimental parchment-making is the only way to know how to recreate (or at least partly understand) some very specific types of parchment that were used for writing purposes many centuries ago.
9 List of Insular manuscripts studied in original: The Royal Athelstan Gospels, London, British Library, Royal MS. 1.B.VII (CLA no. 213); the Northumbrian Gospels, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 197b (CLA no. 125); the Durham Cassiodorus, Durham, Cathedral Library, B.II.30 (CLA no. 152); Fragment of the Gospel-book, Durham, Cathedral Library, A.II.10 + C.II.13 + C.III.20 (CLA no. 147); the Durham Gospels, Durham, Cathedral Library, A.II.17, (CLA no. 149 +150). Study of digitized manuscript: Lindisfarne Gospels, London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero D.IV (CLA no. 187) and St. Cuthbert’s Gospel, London, British Library, Additional 89000 (CLA no. 260).
10 List of Italian manuscripts studied in original: Gospels of St. Augustine, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Auct. D. II. 14 (CLA no.230); Fragment of the Book of Maccabees, Durham Cathedral Library, B.IV.6 (CLA no.153); Gospels of St. Augustine, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 286 (CLA no.126). Study of digitalized manuscript: Harley Gospels, London, British Library, Harley 1775 (CLA no.197).
11 Codex Amiatinus is often mentioned in connection with the St. Cuthbert Gospels (see Lowe, Citation1960; Brown, Citation1969: 57–58).
12 See description above.
13 Many thanks to Dotta.ssa I. Giovanna Rao, the director of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence for the permission to study the original manuscript.
14 I have found it very useful to start a first examination from the middle of the text block rather than from the beginning or end of the codex, as the first and last quires are very often damaged or for some reason are made from ‘untypical’ parchment which differs from the rest of the text block.
15 The parchment’s ‘natural edge’ is the original edge of the skin which was not removed during the cutting of the finished parchment from the frame or during the formatting of the parchment into manuscript folia. As the very edge of the skin was not stretched properly on the frame, it often has gelatinized wrinkles. Into these wrinkles particles of chemicals used during the parchment-making process can be trapped. These deposits can then be visible on the edges of the parchment leaf in the manuscript.
16 The method described in this book for the preparation of calf parchment is not suitable for skin from calves older than 6 weeks.
17 Durham, Cathedral Library, end-leaf in the manuscript B. IV.6. (CLA II. 153).
18 The problem with visually distinguishing the hair follicle pattern on the skin of hair sheep from that on goatskin is also referred to by Ryder (Citation1964).
19 This number was calculated into the number of calves by several scholars including Bruce-Mitford (Citation1967) or Gameson (Citation1992).
20 This discussion was based on the observation of the digital images that I sent to the veterinarian and zoo-archeologist Dr. Annelise Binois-Roman from Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Dr. Sionagh Smith from the Royal School of Veterinary Studies and the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh. Two veterinarians who were consulted independently suggested the same idea in both cases (personal communications, June 2017).
21 There is evidence in many pictures that goats were used for pulling carts or chariots in the 19th century but it seems that this practice was also used in Antiquity, as may be seen on a sarcophagus of Marcus Cornelius Statius from ca. 150 CE in the Louvre Museum in Paris (Inv. Ma 659).
22 As discussed earlier, the parchment of the Codex Amiatinus was prepared from the goatskins, the wool sheep skins (one type prepared in the Late Antique style and second in its modification) and the hair sheepskins.
23 Brown and Lowe and other paleographers considered the Codex Amiatinus to be the work of at least seven scribes (Marsden, Citation1995).
24 This structure is completely against what is expected for an Insular manuscript which should start with the hair side out and be followed in this way: H|F, H|F, H|F, H|F||F|H, F|H, F|H, F|H. The so-called Italian or Continental system, on the other hand, places each flesh and hair side together in the way: F|H, H|F, F|H, H|F||F|H, H|F, H|F, H|F. In fact, the system used in the case of the Codex Amiatinus is quite close to the Italian or so-called Continental one.
25 For an example see quire numbers 6 and 7 on the schematic drawing ()
26 The quire structure made by Paul Meyvaert, and later adopted by R. Gameson, does not match in all details with my observations (Meyvaert, Citation2006).
27 See, for example, quire 11, which is a regular quaternion but with two of its bifolia made from singletons. It is interesting that these singletons are placed where the contents of the biblical books are listed, a place where there might be additional changes in the text of the manuscript. ()
28 My observation on the smaller format of the first quire is in agreement with the description by Christopher de De Hamel (Citation2016: 68).
29 The folds of the bifolia can now (as the codex has been rebound) only be observed on the digital images which were made when the codex was unbound.
30 Gelatinization of the edges of parchment is a long-lasting process based on the natural aging of the parchment.
31 For example, the largest Icelandic manuscript Flateyjarbók, Reykjavík Stofnun Árna Magnússonar, GKS 1005 fol. whose text block measures 422 x 297 mm was rebound at the end of the 18th century in the Royal Library in Copenhagen into two volumes with decorated bindings but its text blocks were not trimmed again despite the fact that its edges were very irregular.
32 Measurements were taken using the micrometer Diesella IP 65, along all the margins of each folio (at the distance about 25 mm from its edge) at least 13 places.
33 Measurement of the Middleton leaves were kindly provided by Gavin Moorhead from the conservation department of the British Library.
34 The calf parchment is approximately 1.5 times thicker than the goat parchment and 2.5 thicker than the sheep parchment. The goat parchment is approximately 2 times thicker than the sheep parchment.
35 These manuscripts also have to ‘smell properly’ even to the Pope – comments of Prof. Martin Carver during personal discussion. (I can only add that indeed it is possible to recognize sheep parchment by smell.)
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Jiří Vnouček
Jiří Vnouček studied conservation in Prague. In 1992/93 he was an intern with Christopher Clarkson at the West Dean College, England. In 2010 he received a Master’s degree in conservation in Copenhagen, Denmark. In 2019 he completed his PhD in interdisciplinary research, which was focused on the visual assessment of parchment in medieval manuscripts, at the University of York (Centre of Medieval Studies and the Department of Archaeology) in England. Specializing in conservation of parchment manuscripts and bookbindings he participated in the EU project IDAP (Improved Damage Analyses of Parchment) and several other research projects in the field of the conservation of parchment manuscripts. His research includes experimental parchment-making and the production of manuscripts in which he gives workshops, lectures and publishes articles. Most recently he is participating in the EU research project Beast to Craft that is using biocodicology as a new approach to the study of parchment manuscripts. https://sites.google.com/palaeome.org/ercb2c.