Make a manuscript page

The activity models one form of Western parchment-book production. Manuscripts were also written on paper, papyrus, and other supports, and many were never codices. The model introduces folded sheets, ruling, writing, and one style of painted initial.

The vocabulary that manuscript catalogs are built from comes up in passing: why a leaf has a recto and a verso and only one number between them, and what the lone word at the bottom of the last page is doing there.

1. Fold the sheet

Fold one sheet once and it forms a bifolium: two leaves and four pages. Several bifolia can be nested to make a quire. The terms folio, quarto, and octavo describe formats defined through folding and sheet structure, but surviving manuscripts do not all follow one folding pattern.

The diagram below borrows a printer's imposition display to show how page positions relate after folding. It is a visualization, not a claim that manuscript scribes normally wrote imposed pages on an unfolded sheet. As the British Library's account of scribal work explains, scribes commonly copied text onto the pages of prepared quires.

Uncut folded edges are often called bolts. A reader or binder may open them with a knife. Each bracket in the diagram represents one bifolium, whose two leaves are physically conjoint. A leaf can later be cut away and leave a stub, so the continued presence of one half does not prove that its partner survives.

2. Rule the lines

Before anyone wrote a word, someone pricked a column of holes down the margin with an awl, then ruled line to line, first with a dry point or a lead plummet, later in pale ink. The grid came before the words, on this page as on every ruled leaf.

The script below is generated nonsense: minims all the way down. Minims defeated contemporary readers too: write minimum in a gothic hand and you get fifteen identical strokes in a row, and after that it is anyone's guess.

3. Illuminate the initial

This activity uses one decorative sequence: a gold-colored field, ground color, letter, and white ornament. Historical methods varied by place, period, material, and workshop. Gold leaf, powdered gold, raised grounds, flat gilding, paint, and ink could require different orders. The Getty Museum's manuscript-making guide describes several materials and stages without treating one sequence as universal.

Each pigment came from somewhere specific: vermilion cooked from mercury and sulfur, verdigris scraped off copper hung over vinegar. The blue, ground lapis lazuli, came overland from the mines of Afghanistan, worth more than the gold beside it.

4. Turn the finished leaf

Put the parts together and the activity produces a page with a broad lower margin and a red opening line. Rubrication refers to the use of red writing or decoration. Modern foliation usually writes the leaf number on its recto and identifies the two sides as f. 41r and f. 41v, but historical numbering practices vary and some manuscripts are paginated.

The generated verso includes a catchword as a teaching device. In many medieval codices, a catchword appears in the lower margin of the final page of a quire and repeats the first word or words of the following quire. It does not normally label every verso with the next page's first word. See the British Library's explanation of catchwords.

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