Hi, and welcome again
to the project session of Deciphering Secrets,
The Illuminated Manuscripts of Medieval Europe.
In this third unit,
we have been dealing with inks and writing instruments and with quires or gatherings,
and that is what the project will undertake as well.
Let's start as always,
with the board project.
By now, I think you can already imagine what your assignment will be.
You'll have to look for five manuscripts indications that illustrate
five different concepts that have been dealt with in the lectures,
and write a brief comment on each of them using
the technical vocabulary that you have learnt in the videos.
Here, you have some ideas but by no means,
you need to stick to them, ink making miniatures,
intense blackness of the carbon ink on Papyrus
or other supports in spite of the pass of time,
black carbon ink losing intensity on parchment, carbon black line,
outlining color this spaces maybe to prevent that the pigments react with each other,
different types of quires,
holes in the centerfolds of the quires that apparently have been used for
tacketing the quire bifolia together while the book block was still unbound,
imposition of the text on uncut quarternions.
The rubric will be more or less the same as in the previous unit.
However, we have added a new criterion.
You will be able to add a few images relating the previous unit,
that's if you can remember,
dealt with books formats and writing materials.
From now on, we have included this criterion as
well in all the rubrics of the board project.
You will find the complete rubric in the documentation section of this video.
In the ransom project,
we are building the quires or gatherings for our manuscript.
That means that you have to fold each of your parchment skins.
First, you have to decide the general size that your final manuscript will have.
My advice for you there is that you should stick to a relatively small format.
In any case, not bigger than present A5 210 by 148 millimeters,
and I personally would go for something even a smaller something near
the present A6 148 by 105 millimeters.
That will make your whole product cheaper because you will need
fewer cardboard sheets and also you will have
less space to rule and to write in later units.
Then, you will have to decide how you will make your quires.
If you want to fold two separate leaves in quarter and then insert one into the other,
or you want to fold in octaval.
And then of course,
follow one of the folding procedures that we have seen in the lectures.
The easiest will be to stick to quaternions,
but you can go up to sinions, if you wish.
By experience, I know that larger gatherings can be
troublesome and therefore my advice is to avoid them.
Depending on the original size of
your skins and the final size you want to give to your book,
you might need to cut your skins in halves before your fold them.
Trial and error will be here, your best guide.
Another decision you have to make right now is if you
want to cut your quires open and then keep
the resulting bifolia together by means of
a sort of tacket or you want to impose your text,
in which case, you can spoil this operation,
but you will suffer quite a bit in the later stage of copying your text.
However, that shouldn't be too bad either
because you won't need to write all your quires,
at least not if you don't feel like it.
And one or two pages should suffice to give you the feeling of being a medieval copyist.
And of course, you can opt for something more eclectic, cutting,
and tacketing some quires and leave the others
uncut and experiment a little bit with both procedures.
Disruption would be considered quite unorthodox in the Middle Ages but here,
I do not see why you shouldn't do that.
And finally, you have to decide
which system you will choose to keep your quires in order.
If you decide to go for the signature in any of its modalities,
you can already mark your quires but do it with
a pencil because you might need to change its place later.
This operation wouldn't be performed right this point here in the Middle Ages,
but when the actual copying started.
However, since we have been dealing with it in the lectures of this unit,
let's do it now.
Remember, that you must document everything and make a sort of dossier with some photos.
Your smartphone or your webcam will suffice for this.
And do not worry too much about the quality of the photos.
Again, check the rubric in the documentation section of this video to
make sure that you know the assessment criteria before you submit your exercise.
After submitting your exercise,
you will receive the exercises of three of your classmates,
and you have to assess them.
For that, follow the rubric too,
and don't forget to add remarks to help your classmates,
and notice that both the exercise and their assessment have deadlines.
Dr. Roger Louis Martínez-DávilaAssociate Professor
Ana B. Sanchez-PrietoDr. in Medieval History, Dr. in Education Sciences
