parchment
Fur, suitably treated and dried to be written or printed on both sides.
Parchment (Greek pergamene and Latin pergamina or pergamena ), is the name given to an animal skin, usually goat, sheep, lamb or sheep, prepared for her writing.
still refers to the written document on this support.
Its name comes from the city where it will first manufactured: Pergamon, Greece.
It was widely used in Western antiquity and the Middle Ages, to the dissemination of Chinese paper invention.
Parchment vellum (calf uterine): p. made with skin of unborn calves; very good quality, white and thin.
When comes the parchment revolutionizes the process of producing documents. The parchment is obtained from calf skin, goat, sheep, lamb or sheep, and prepared for them to write and paint.
When made from delicate skins of calves or lambs, they were called vellum scrolls. These skins gave a more flexible and soft writing support, higher than papyrus . Parchment skins allowed to replace the roll (volumen) the codex .
Scriptoria (monastic offices)
Christian monasteries kept scrolls libraries in scriptoria (plural of scriptorium ) the learned monks devoted themselves to copying manuscripts and should to this monastic activity the survival of classical texts of Greek and Latin culture in the West, especially at the time of Byzantine empire.
From the IR nE century, the scroll began to replace papyrus as a writing support; numerous codices were written on this support. From the century. XIII, the parchment began to be replaced by paper.
The parchment has been used since antiquity; in the Middle Ages it became the most used support for the manuscript - and many other documents.
Production
The production of papyrus, which emerged in Egypt, was limited to the area where it grows the plant that gave rise to it.
For parchment were used sheepskins, goat and veal. Vellum was a scroll of high quality and high price; came from stillborn calves. Manufacturing parchment was an expensive process; a voluminous codex required skin of dozens of animals.
The manufacture and marketing of parchment by pergaminheiros was a profitable business. To properly support the ink of the writing and illumination of the pigments, the skin was treated to make it sturdy, flexible and handleable.
After skinning the animal, the skin was washed in water and cleaned of impurities.- Since drained, it was sprinkled with lime, folded on the flesh side to dry for weeks. It was stretched on wooden frames to dry under tension, while it was sprinkled with chalk powder - which prevented the writing ink was absorbed by the scroll.
- Finally, the skin was polished with pumice to the surface is smooth, uniform and bright.
- The scroll was cut so as to define the area of the sheet; depending on this sheet was folded once, twice or three times, the obtained folio-formats, fourth and octavo.
- Already folded, the leaves were grouped into notebooks and trimmed for uniform formats.
- To write the scribe-calligrapher often used a goose quill , whose tip was split watering ink. A knife at hand, served to sharpen the tip of the pen.
THE PAPER
- "The paper was invented in 105 AD by Cai Lun, a senior official of the imperial court, the Han Dynasty (206 ªC.-220 AD), a time that corresponded in the West, to the reign of Emperor Trajan."
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