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Written on Beasts
Bruce Holsinger
7-9 minutes
Monkeys making parchment.jpg
Bodleian LibraryMonkeys making parchment, from a fourteenth-century copy of the
Romance of Alexander

For a thousand years, the societies of the Western world transmitted and preserved
much of their written cultures on and between the skins of beasts. Cows and calves,
rams, ewes, and lambs, camels, deer, and fauns, goats, gazelles, and horses, seals
and walruses, perhaps cats and dogs on occasion were rendered into scrolls and
codices, bindings and booklets, charters and mezuzot. A large part of our written
inheritance survives as a great mass of animal remains.

Parchment, a medium that came into widespread use beginning in late antiquity, has
for many centuries held a special place in the cultural imagination. “When you want
to have the love of whatever woman you wish,” advises a medieval necromancer’s
manual, “first you must have a totally white dove and parchment made from a female
dog that is in heat.” In the Talmud parchment comes in for extended discussion,
much of it devoted to the ritual treatment of animal skins. Tractate Shabbath, the
Talmudic book that deals with rules for the Sabbath, contains rigorous rabbinical
debates over the suitability of certain kinds of membranes for sacred use: the
perforated skins of birds, the split hides of cows and sheep. “Can teffilin be
written on the skin of a clean fish?” a rabbi asks at one point. No, answers
another–but only because of the smell.

Late medieval writers such as the anonymous author of the Middle English “Charter
of Christ” likened the tortured body of Christ on the cross to a width of parchment
stretched on a wooden frame, inscribed with the blood of the Passion. Shakespeare
surely had such analogies in mind when writing Jack Cade’s Blackheath sermon in
Henry VI, Part 2, in which the rebel leader addresses men assembled to revolt
against the king. In Shakespeare’s dramatization, the leader purposefully conflates
animal medium and legal message: “Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin
of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? That parchment, being scribbled o’er,
should undo a man?”

Not everyone held parchment in high esteem. Irish and Icelandic scribes complain
about the poor quality of the skins (I might as well be writing on wool!), and
often must content themselves with rough, uneven scraps in times of scarcity. We
get a wonderful rant against the creaturely properties of parchment in the writings
of Abū ʿUthmān ʿAmr ibn Baḥr al-Jāḥiẓ, a theologian, traveler, and jack-of-all-
trades who died in Basra in the late 860s. Like many writers in the early Islamic
world, al-Jāḥiẓ favored paper over its membrane counterpart. “Tell me why you extol
writing on skins and urge me to use parchment when you know that skins are thick in
bulk and heavy in weight,” al-Jāḥiẓ demands in one of his surviving letters. Skins,
he avows, “have a more fetid odor” than paper. “They are aged to remove their odor
and to clear away the hair. They have more knots and bulges, more troughs and
dips.”

vellum with hair.jpg

Scott GwaraVellum with intact hair, from a copy of Gregory the Great’s Moralia in
Iob at the Beinecke Library, Yale University

medical text.jpg
The British LibraryAn early fourteenth-century medical text from the British
Library (detail), with a haunch cutaway visible at the base of the folio
arte of venerie.jpg
Folger Shakespeare Library A copy of George Gascoigne’s The noble arte of venerie
or hunting (1577), rebound in deerskin in the nineteenth century

Dutch hide.jpg
National Archive in the HagueA Dutch legal register bound in a furry hide

vellum repair.jpg
Erik KwakkelA wandering vellum repair in a tenth-century manuscript of Boethius

Leabhar Ua Maine.jpg
Royal Irish Academy, DublinA scribe swerves to avoid gaps in the parchment in the
Leabhar Ua Maine, a fourteenth-century Irish miscellany

Hereford Mappamundi.jpg
The Hereford Mappamundi (ca. 1300), a map of the world drawn on a single piece of
calf hide

Contemporary parchment makers are all too familiar with the smelly, greasy side of
their arcane craft. Jesse Meyer, a leading parchment artisan in North America,
works in the family tannery in Montgomery, New York, pungent with calf hides
purchased from slaughterhouses in the area and stacks of curing deerskins brought
in by local hunters. In the United Kingdom, parchment is made on a more industrial
scale at William Cowley, the favored purveyor to Her Majesty’s government.
Remarkably, English law still requires that official copies of Acts of Parliament
be printed and preserved on animal skin, inspiring occasional debates in
Westminster over the ethics and economy of the parchment trade. A recommendation by
the Administration Committee this session may bring the venerable tradition to an
end, much to the consternation of the conservation and book arts communities.

Those wanting a glimpse at the vast parchment inheritance of the premodern world
can browse a nearly limitless array of membrane books and documents in digital
form, now freely available through such specialized databases as Irish Scripts on
Screen and The Digital Walters as well as online portals hosted by the British
Library, the Bodleian Library, and even the Vatican, which is in the process of
digitizing some eighty thousand of its medieval books. The latest entrant into this
crowded field is the Priory Library of Durham Cathedral, which has just announced
that it will be digitizing a collection of books owned and used by the Benedictines
of Durham over many centuries.

The scholarly analysis of this sprawling resource has spawned an entire field
called digital palaeography, currently in a state of glorious chaos. Its leaders—
Peter Stokes, Benjamin Albritton, Ainoa Castro, Ségolène Tart, Stephen Nichols, and
Martin Foys, among others—are developing rigorous new tools and methods for
visualizing, annotating, and understanding this online archive in all its vastness
and complexity. Foys has been working with the British Library and the Schoenberg
Institute for Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania to develop an
online resource for the study, annotation and linking of digital manuscript images.
As Foys tells me, “The state of a manuscript as it survives today is often only the
latest of several permutations. We are slowly developing the technological capacity
to represent this ‘deep time’ of a manuscript digitally—how its content or material
form shifts over the centuries of its existence, providing us with not a singular
manuscript object, but a lived matrix of what it has been.”

Of course, none of these scholars would suggest that digitized manuscripts, however
delightful or democratizing, can or should replace the real thing. Zooming in on a
high-resolution magnification of a folio from the Beowulf manuscript can give an
impression of breathtaking intimacy with hide and scribe alike, and emerging
technologies will undoubtedly continue to yield discoveries of great importance.
Yet your computer screen will tell you very little about the heft and scent of a
codex, nor can your iPhone quite replicate the distinctive crinkle of a parchment
folio, let alone that peachy fuzz of fine vellum on the thumb. The sensual richness
of the written record confronts us like nothing else can with the sobering
animality of our archive: the ghost of a spine, the curve of a haunch; patterns of
scar tissue, hair follicles, sutures snaking across flayed skin; bindings as fuzzy
as a cat. The written record is a vast storehouse of creaturely remains that
continue to claim our attention and wonder.