In the rich medieval book collection of the University Library in Leiden, a special manuscript was discovered by Erik Kwakkel, researcher at the Faculty of Humanities. It concerns a book from the first half of the eleventh century that was made entirely from waste from the processing of animal skins into parchment. The manuscript shows that cost savings were already being made in the Middle Ages.
dr. Erik Kwakkel, who works at the Leiden University Institute for Cultural Disciplines (LUICD), discovered the special booklet when he was preparing an exhibition on the occasion of a colloquium on Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. Kwakkel is familiar with the physical characteristics of skin remnants and was therefore able to recognize the special nature of the book.
He argues in a forthcoming study that readers in the Middle Ages also recycled waste to write short messages on it, such as ballot papers, short notes and lecture notes.
He has now found a book in the University Library that consists entirely of this residual material. Never before has such a book been identified in a Dutch collection. The view of medieval copyists that "such scraps are unsuitable for a normal book" is at odds with the finding of the manuscript.
In the production of parchment, the basic material for books, the outer edge of a prepared animal skin was cut away. This resulted in long strips of waste about 15 centimeters wide with a yellow-brown color, cracks and holes. The waste bars were not considered suitable for writing on, so the residual material was thrown away or used to boil glue. Modern calligraphers still cut away the outer edge of the animal skin. The low cost of the residual material is the reason for this example of a medieval cycle.
The reader could not expect a work of perfect quality for a low price:the pages are strongly discolored, not rectangular in shape, but follow the contours of the beast, and are very small (less than 14 centimeters high). Moreover, the copyist literally had to make ends meet (waste) to make acceptable pages. The booklet stands in stark contrast to the imposing works of the time. It shows a relatively unknown side of medieval book production, where sometimes it apparently didn't matter how shabby the final product turned out.
The booklet mainly consists of a commentary on Prudentius. This classic author was very popular in medieval education and it is therefore likely that the work was intended for study purposes. The book is part of a binding of three medieval manuscripts and was produced in France in the first half of the eleventh century. In 1690 the University Library acquired it from the estate of Isaac Vossius.
Video in which Erik Kwakkel explains his discovery (in English):