MS C189 Introduction
During the middle ages, manuscript pages were made from parchment, or in some cases vellum. Parchment is a writing surface made from stretched sheep or goatskin, whereas vellum is made from calfskin. Vellum is a smooth, even writing surface that surpasses parchment in both quality and cost. Parchment is sturdy but it is also difficult and costly to produce. Older manuscripts were sometimes recycled for the production of new books. A scraping device such as pumice was commonly used to erase text and reuse pages, this creates what is known as a palimpsest. Occasionally, bookbinders used fragments of manuscripts as book spines. In some cases, old manuscript leaves were cut and folded to fit the cover of a new book.
Don’t judge a book by its cover
The cover, the front flyleaves and the back flyleaves of MS C189 are made up of parchment leaves from three different manuscripts. This manuscript is placed inside fragments of two manuscripts and then wrapped with a third one. Parchment was folded in half to produce a limp binding, this is known as a bifolium. Two folios (singular pages) were folded in half to form flyleaves at the front and back of the manuscript. Flyleaves act as barriers, protecting the main text from pest damage such as worming.
The parchment cover is attached to the book block by exposed leather split laces. The split laces exit through single slits and each lace returns through two separate slits to create a V shape. The split laces are mostly intact. All edges of the cover are large enough to allow for turn-ins. The upper margin of the bifolium was trimmed to form what is now the fore-edge turn-in for the front cover. The cover has lapped miters; the fore-edge turn-ins lie on top of the head and tail turn-ins at the corner of the miters.