Bruce Holsinger - On Parchment: Animals, Archives, and the Making of Culture from Herodotus to the Digital Age

On Parchment

Animals, Archives, and the Making of Culture
from Herodotus to the Digital Age

BRUCE HOLSINGER

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS | NEW HAVEN & LONDON

Published with assistance from the Ronald and Betty Miller Turner Publication Fund.

Copyright 2022 by Bruce Holsinger.

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022934634

ISBN 978-0-300-26021-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)

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For my students

The fields of book history, codicology, and diplomatics rely on an array of discipline-specific terminologies that can be confusing to the non-specialist. This holds true even for a seemingly straightforward term such as parchment (Lat. pergamena, Fr. parchemin, Hebr. kelaf, dukhsustos, gevil, Arab. raqq, riqq, jild), which refers to animal skin processed in a particular way to serve as a support for script, print, or image, though some of what passes for more ancient parchment is likely tanned leather. Parchment is often conflated with vellum, which often refers more narrowly to the processed skins of calves (from Lat. vitulinum, Fr. vlin, hence veal). Here I follow modern bibliographical practice in distinguishing the terms, though some early sources use them interchangeablyand in many writings from outside Western European or Christian contexts, the distinction is largely meaningless. More generally I have tried to keep bibliographic argot to a minimum, defining certain terms where relevant while respecting the conventions of the particular fields this study traverses. A book that draws from sources in over twenty languages across many centuries has required extensive consultation with specialists, always with an eye for philological precision in the transliteration and contextualization of key words from Greek, Arabic, Latin, Coptic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Irish, Persian, and other languages. I have generally cited existing translations where available, in some cases with silent emendations; for the most

On Parchment

F or well over a thousand years, the societies of the Euro-Mediterranean world transmitted and preserved much of their written cultures on the skins of animals. A good part of what we will ever know about the premodern era we know because people wrote things down and saved them on and between the hides of slaughtered beasts. Cows and calves, rams, ewes, and lambs, camels, hyenas, deer and fawns, goats and gazelles and their kids, pigs, donkeys and horses, seals and walruses, occasionally fish and birds, and perhaps squirrels, rabbits, even cats and dogs on occasion were rendered by human animals into scrolls and codices, charters and wills, Talmuds and treatises, Qurns and cartularies, leases and mezuzot, amulets and bindings and booklets.

Other mediums for the written word were in use during this epoch, of course. Students, scholars, and merchants might record notes or transactions on wax tablets easily effaced and reused, while stone, ivory, brass, wood and bark, bone, lead sheets and gold served as popular surfaces for inscriptions of devotion and remembrance. Nevertheless, between about the middle of the fourth century and the end of the fifteenth, between the age of St. Augustine and the advent of the Reformation, cultures of writing in this vast part of the world relied fundamentally on the rendered flesh of beasts.

Only a small fraction of this animal archive has endured the ravages of time, deliberate destruction, and disaster. Even so, the extant membrane record consists of some one to three billion discrete pieces of animal skin that together make up a large part of the surviving written inheritance of the premodern world. Medieval monks have been credited more than once with saving civilizationthat is, with maintaining the legacy of ancient cultures through their labors of transcription and preservation. The preservation, transcription, study, and, most recently, digitization of the animal archive have together yielded one of the great surviving records of human civilization: a material history both ecumenical and pancultural, reaching across creeds, continents, empires, and many languages, and all derived from the animals who roamed and grazed among the human creatures who consumed their flesh, boiled their bones, wore their hides, and wrote and painted and notated music on their skins.

Parchment also forms a biological record, one of immense scope and astounding variety. Every surviving piece of it is a specimen of flesh, and each specimen carries biomolecular and chemical data inherent to the structure of the membrane medium. In the course of researching and writing this book, I have collaborated with scientists, conservators, and humanities scholars in investigating the molecular content of parchment, sampling the recto of a folio, the dorse of a scroll. As this process has shown us, we are only beginning to appreciate the vast biotic record the parchment inheritance represents: countless specimens of collagen, DNA, and other proteins and molecules recoverable through non-destructive sampling protocols and ever more refined laboratory techniques just now coming on line (and perhaps superseded even by the time these words appear in print). The biomolecular data latent in the animal archive has remained largely untapped. Participating in its collection and interpretation has led me to a jarring shift of perspective on what exactly parchment is: its quiddity or essence, as philosophers might say.

The scientific and cultural dimensions of the parchment record do not always go hand in hand, though I have thought often about the interplay of theology and genetics, of molecules and meaning as I have approached the questions pursued in this book. As a creaturely medium invested with great imaginative energy, parchment invites speculation about the deep interconnections among nature and culture, human and animal, life and death, past and present, even as it complicates and fuses such categories at every turn. For the premodern world, parchment was a product of pastoral husbandry and urban economies, a commodity of subtle craftsmanship and ingenuity, a material of ubiquitous practical usage, a frequent object of poetic and devotional contemplation: both a measure and an agent of environmental, evolutionary, and social change.

Parchment must also be understood as an immense record of human-animal relations over millennia of civilization, though not in ways always friendly to contemporary modes of ethical reflection on the subject.

Yet unlike Derridas cat, who challenges the naked philosopher with a stare of nonhuman indifference, the parchment record confronts us with the crushing weight of all-too-human tradition, and speaks back to us mutely, in our own words. For with some occasional and short-lived exceptions, no other world cultures have deployed animals to nearly the same extent in making written records and preserving collective memory. Parchment embodies humanitys enduring and continuing dominion over the animal world. The parchment inheritance, in its immensity, longevity, and variety, might be understood as the historical and archival incarnation of this dominion, as well as a vast environmental record of its implications and effects. Perhaps the troubled intellectual legacy of the human-animal relation lies not only in our enduring philosophical entanglements with animals, but also in the peculiar and deep-seated reliance of this legacy on their inscribed physical remains.