On Parchment

A sweeping exploration of the shaping role of animal skins in written culture and human imagination over three millennia "Richly detailed and illustrated. . . . An engaging exploration of book history."--Kirkus Reviews For centuries, premodern societies recorded and preserved much of their written cultures on parchment: the rendered skins of sheep, cows, goats, camels, deer, gazelles, and other creatures. These remains make up a significant portion of the era's surviving historical record. In a study spanning three millennia and twenty languages, Bruce Holsinger explores this animal archive as it shaped the inheritance of the Euro-Mediterranean world, from the leather rolls of ancient Egypt to the Acts of Parliament in the United Kingdom. Holsinger discusses the making of parchment past and present, the nature of the medium as a biomolecular record of faunal life and environmental history, the knotty question of "uterine vellum," and the imaginative role of parchment in the works of St. Augustine, William Shakespeare, and a range of Jewish rabbinic writers of the medieval era. Closely informed by the handicraft of contemporary makers, painters, and sculptors, the book draws on a vast array of sources--codices and scrolls, documents and ephemera, works of craft and art--that speak to the vitality of parchment across epochs and continents. At the center of On Parchment is the vexed relationship of human beings to the myriad slaughtered beasts whose remains make up this vast record: a relationship of dominion and compassion, of brutality and empathy.

Medieval prayer books held not only the devotions and meditations of Christianity, but also housed, slipped between pages, sundry notes, reminders, and ephemera, such as pilgrims' badges, sworn oaths, and small painted images. Many of these last items have been classified as manuscript illumination, but Kathryn M. Rudy argues that these pictures should be called, instead, parchment paintings, similar to postcards. In a delightful study identifying this group of images for the first time, Rudy delineates how these objects functioned apart from the books in which they were kept. Whereas manuscript illuminations were designed to provide a visual narrative to accompany a book's text, parchment paintings offered a kind of autonomous currency for exchange between individuals--people who longed for saturated color in a gray world of wood, stone, and earth. These small, colorful pictures offered a brilliant reprieve, and Rudy shows how these intriguing and previously unfamiliar images were traded and cherished, shedding light into the everyday life and relationships of those in the medieval Low Countries.

Chretien de Troyes was France's great medieval poet—inventor of the genre of courtly romance and popularizer of the Arthurian legend. The forty-four surviving manuscripts of his work (ten of them illuminated) pose a number of questions about who used these books and in what way. In Sealed in Parchment, Sandra Hindman scrutinizes both text and images to reveal what the manuscripts can tell us about medieval society and politics.

Asks how the 'parchment' promises of a written constitution are translated into political practice, working through the many problems of constitutional implementation after adoption.

What is the status of visual evidence in history? Can we actually see the past through images? Where are the traces of previous lives deposited? Michael Camille addresses these important questions in Mirror in Parchment, a lively, searching study of one medieval manuscript, its patron, producers, and historical progeny. The richly illuminated Luttrell Psalter was created for the English nobleman Sir Geoffrey Luttrell (1276-1345). Inexpensive mechanical illustration has since disseminated the book's images to a much wider audience; hence the Psalter's representations of manorial life have come to profoundly shape our modern idea of what medieval English people, high and low, looked like at work and at play. Alongside such supposedly truthful representations, the Psalter presents myriad images of fantastic monsters and beasts. These patently false images have largely been disparaged or ignored by modern historians and art historians alike, for they challenge the credibility of those pictures in the Luttrell Psalter that we wish to see as real. In the conviction that medieval images were not generally intended to reflect daily life but rather to shape a new reality, Michael Camille analyzes the Psalter's famous pictures as representations of the world, imagined and real, of its original patron. Addressed are late medieval chivalric ideals, physical sites of power, and the boundaries of Sir Geoffrey's imagined community, wherein agricultural laborers and fabulous monsters play a similar ideological role. The Luttrell Psalter thus emerges as a complex social document of the world as its patron hoped and feared it might be.

It is A.D. 70, and Evardus, a wine merchant from Gaul, has encountered a dying rabbi on a road outside of Jerusalem. With his final breaths, the old man urgently tells Evardus that Jewish priests have spirited sacred objects and records away from Herod's Temple in the hope of keeping them out of the hands of Roman soldiers--who are, at that very moment, attacking Jerusalem and destroying the Jews' most holy site. The merchant learns of a copper scroll hidden beneath the Holy of Holies and a map that leads to the holy objects. A thousand years later, while on a Crusade to Palestine, a descendant of the merchant finally uncovers those secrets below the temple. They include an astonishing parchment that threatens the very foundations of the Church and Christianity. The grand master of the Templars develops a scheme to advance the interests of his order, but the plan has devastating consequences. The parchment survives, however, and for nearly a millennium remains hidden in plain sight. With the dawning of the twenty-first century and pivotal world events, two American professors discover the document while researching a book. Like those before, they are tempted to use it for their own purposes. The course they pursue leads to unforeseen consequences that affect events in the Middle East and a crucial turning point for the Vatican. Gerald McLaughlin shows us a rich, haunting tableau that spans two thousand years. We are given a timely glimpse into the often-disastrous ways that we tend to deal with faith when confronted by fear and ambition, and how moral choices are made in the face of the continuing battle between good and evil--both in ourselves and in the world. Ultimately, the author shines a light of profound hope and faith into the darkest recesses of the human soul, our modern life, and world events.