Loose Pastedown
At the back of LJS 184 is a piece of roughly cut, cow-skin parchment which was for many centuries glued to the back wooden board cover. The UPenn catalog description mentioned that there was a loose pastedown, but it said nothing about there being text on the back of it. When I found it and saw that it was potentially legible, I became obsessed with finding out what it said and what it revealed about the manuscript's history.
While they were unsuccessful at deciphering the text due to technological limitations of 1990, I -- with the expert help of Will Noel, Amey Hutchins, and Isabella Reinhardt -- was able to read parts of the document using a small ultraviolet (UV) light source and basic photo enhancement software (Mac Preview). My reading confirms Quandt's conclusions that the pastedown was a Latin land charter written in a slightly later hand than the main manuscript. My discoveries include:
A name: Guillem
Locations: an unknown "villa," "Domengus" (possibly an individual's name), and "Aragon"
And a date: 1330
The date is fascinating because it complicates our understanding of the manuscript's history and/or its construction in two ways:
- This piece of parchment is at least 30 to 55 years older than the dates (ca. 1265-1299) given for the manuscript's composition.
- If the presumed date of composition is correct, then the wood binding must not be as original as previously thought.
Based on analysis of the rest of the book, as well as Quandt's analysis of the manuscript's binding, I believe that the second hypothesis is most probably the case.
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