Crafting Documents, c. 500 - c. 800 CE

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This innovative project brings together technical analysis of parchment and ink with a palaeographical examination of penmanship to explore, for the first time, how documents were made in the key transitional period between the writing practices of Antiquity and those of the Middle Ages, c. 500 to c. 800. At its centre is the systematic exploitation of a huge but almost entirely neglected corpus of tiny documents, many no more than a few centimetres long, which hitherto have been judged too insignificant for attention. They will be analysed to reveal a hitherto invisible world of widespread informal writing which has escaped the notice of scholars who study medieval manuscript books (codices) and formal documents such as charters granting land, offices and privileges. Treating these minute documents as textual artefacts, Crafting Documents will shed new light on the poorly understood artisan skills required to manufacture parchment and to prepare ink in this period. Building on this basis, it seeks to understand how the skills involved in forming letters with a pen were affected by the quality of the writing surface and of the ink. New understanding of the material constraints and affordances will generate new knowledge of why handwriting evolved in these centuries. Additionally, the research will shift attention away from the well-known, elite writing centres and reveal a wide range of hitherto unknown locales where the necessary practical and technical skills were known.To achieve this, the team members will analyse the identificatory labels which were attached to Christian relic-objects, several hundred of which have survived in ecclesiastical treasuries and archives in Italy, Switzerland and France. Relic-objects originated everywhere from Ireland to the Middle East, and this holy matter circulated as very small bundles parcelled up in cloth or parchment with a label attached to each one. These were readily portable and, in consequence, often survived far from their place of creation. The four large collections of them at the centre of the project thus provide unprecedented opportunities to make a systematic examination writing samples from across Europe and possibly beyond, and to explore the significance of these highly mobile objects as vectors in the hidden transmission of several different craft skills. To accomplish this, Crafting Documents brings together established expertise in the history of Christian relic practices with new developments in computer-assisted palaeography and manuscript science. Working will the permission of the repositories concerned, material analysis techniques for establishing the composition of parchment and ink as well as 3D microscopy of the writing surface will be used. Where permission has been granted, this will be combined with micro-invasive proteomic analysis of parchment to identify the animal species from which the parchment was prepared. Co-ordination of the results with a detailed palaeographical analysis of script, characteristic features of handwriting, and ecclesiastical context will create a new cultural geography of scribal activity, artisan skills, and relic cults in the early Middle Ages.