Gazette 63

The ‘Twelfth Century Renaissance’ and its palaeographical transformations had some impact on Jewish culture in North-Western Europe in general and on the Hebrew script in particular. Very few Hebrew books from this period have been preserved, but they testify nonetheless to an intense literary creativity and book production as well as to the profound changes in the Hebrew script. At some point in the twelfth century, the Hebrew script used in Northern France, England and the Holy Roman Empire Qands often referred to by a general term Ashkenaz, »Germany ») had acquired pronounced Gothic features. This paper briefly presents the available corpus of the earliest dated Ashkenazi manuscripts still in existence, and analyses the pertinent palaeographical features of their different subtypes.

The nationalization of ecclesiastical property in France, ordered in a series of decrees from 1789-1791, gave rise to the procedure of inventorying the libraries of ecclesiastical establishments. This included both French and « foreign » establishments (located on territories recently occupied by Revolutionary France), thus producing a very rich documentary history which can « fix » the final state of collections of manuscripts and old printed books before they were dispersed. For collections that were formed in the medieval period and for which no catalogs were preserved, the revolutionary inventory becomes a unique tool which allows the study of the medieval library and its eventual reconstitution. This article fornses on the inventory of manuscripts (89 items) from the library of the Benedictine abbey of Gembloux (Belgium), recently discovered by us in the National Archives of France and identified as a copy of an revolutionary inventory established in 1795 (until now was considered lost). The richness and very rigorous methodology of the inventory allowed us to suggest identification for 84 items from the surviving manuscripts, all preserved today at the Royal Library of Belgium.

Founded in 1 11 5 by Saint Bernard, the abbey of Clairvaux’s library was amongst the richest of the Western world. The earliest manuscripts in the collection were the products of the abbey scriptorium with some external contributions. By the end of the century, Clairvaux held about 3 50 volumes, reaching 1,790 by 1472. Of the 1,115 manuscripts that remain, about 500, of which around 160 date from the so-called Romanesque period, retain their medieval bindings. While most of these bindings seem to have been made on site by the monks or lay brothers, some were imported and a series of twelve decorative bindings, which stand out from the sober monastic style, actually came from urban workshops. The main characteristics of Clairvaux’s bindings are their tab endbands, as well as the fine alum-tawed skin and their secondary covering, called a chemise, made of leather with hair left on. The nature of the skin used has long been a question. Traditionally described by cataloguers and historians as deer- or boar-skin, proteomics analysis helped to identify the animal species as seal (phocidae).

The potential information to be obtained from the large corpus of codices and documents written on parchment is immense. Aside from the obvious textual information there is a wealth of biomolecular information trapped in the fibres of the parchment itself. We have developed a non-invasive method for sampling parchment, using conventional conservation erasers, enabling us to objectively identify the species origin of the membranes through the use of peptide mass fingerprinting (PMF) and from this begin to shed light on the manufacturing processes. By performing a widespread and systematic analysis of species origin of parchment documents we can begin to address questions about local animal economies, craft production and book production, demonstrating the importance of parchment objects.

The 13^th century portable bibles have always been admired for their very thin and high-quality parchment, but questions have also risen about the animal origin and the manufacturing techniques used for the production of their writing support. Various hypotheses have been put forward on this subject. This contribution tries to review the knowledge concerning this material, to identify the differences between the parchment of French, Italian and English origin and to estimate the number of skins that were used for this production. Finally, this paper evaluates the role of the thickness of the parchment, measured instrumentally on 93 manuscripts, in the miniaturisation process of the Bible in the 13^th century.