However, on the issue of where monasteries got their parchment, and the quantities in which they got it, there are exceptions, both regional and occasional. That is, in more outlying regions, monasteries continued to make their own parchment, and made it seasonally, as the annual slaughter of animals was done, preparatory to wintering under cover.

Whether a person acquired a book from a secular or monastic scriptorium was partly determined by the sort of book it was, and partly by the degree to which the religious authorities felt nervous about the contents. Books of Hours, for example, tended to be ordered from monastic scriptoria, whereas packs of cards were almost always got from secular sources by the mid-fifteenth century. Before that, we do have records of their being made as memento-pictures by members of the Domincian order.

Sorry – I’ve run on. But I would be very glad to read more of Barbara’s writings about the Vms.

This is the same as what I’ve been able to read ( in less detail ) on the Italian web.
Also that the folded sheets were put ‘fold into fold’ , so one would have to be folded one way the next in another way, (or you would get hair to flesh).

For the Voynich MS we know, of course, that it
was not written on fully prepared quires, or at
best only part of it (at most up to and including
quire 8 ) could have been.

But I suppose it should have occurred to me that this would make more sense than handing a scribe a pile of loose sheets, a pen, and a sewing needle. Storing prepared, sewn and assembled quires would make much more sense. Rich.

Monastic scriptoria may be eliminated as a material source because they
produced parchment or vellum only when required for a planed book, or to
renew the personal stock of the abbey’s prior, accountant, or other person
who’d a regular need to keep records. Monastic writing material was not
stored but used almost immediately. By the end of the 13thC the
monastaries had been overtaken as the major source of books, documents, and
writing material, and by the 15thC most monastaries actually ordered their
materiels from lay stationers. Secular scriptoria were the main source of
books by the begining of the 14thC.

That leaves us with secular stationers who sprang up in the late 11thC and
soon became the primary source of writing material. Most commonly Vellum was
produced and stored in whole quires. The hide was prepared and then while
still animal shaped folded across its length, once (forget the name for this
size but it was used in the Codex Gigas) twice, (quarto) thrice (octavo) or
again to produce the size of the VM which I do not believe anyone has named
but it was a popular size with students. Then it was trimmed into
gatherings which as a natural consequence of the folding had hair side
facing hair and flesh side facing flesh. Note here that until Caroline
times the flesh side was outermost on quires, but from the 9th to the end of
the 14thCs it was the hair side that was outermost. In the 15thC the order
went back to flesh outermost in imitation of early Caroline practice. No one
knows why this order reversal took place, only that it did, and many
appraisers regard which side is outermost as an infallible method of placing
an MS in its historical context. Most often, just after folding and
trimming, these loose gatherings would be sown together.

Other hides could be cut into sheets, but most of these would
be sown into the above gatherings to make 5+ sheet quire. Other Single
sheets were sometimes cut and/or sown into rolls (the roll being an
administrative government document that was extended as needed over a year)
or odd sized individual sheets were set aside for document work.

It really depended upon the demands the stationers customers usually made
which the stationer would anticipate. Sheepskins were popular for patents,
donations, declarations, etc that only needed one side. There were always
more sheep than cattle but it took a heck of a lot of work to make the flesh
side of sheep hide writable. The stationers’ solution to this problem was
only to prepare the hair side and sell them for one sided documents. This is
the origin of the slang term for a university degree; “a sheepskin”.

Most stationers, right from earliest times, adopted the practice of storing
individual quires, sheets or rolls, in cloth until sold.

The thing to remember is that in all eras demand always outstripped supply.

Right then, that’s the main facts, now for my own deductions for what
they’re worth along with more facts; I’ll try to make clear which is which.

So while it is not impossible that enough blank quires and sheets to create
the VMS lay around for decades before use, it is so improbable that it
beggars belief. This is particularly the case for high quality vellum such
as the semi transparent skunk, or uterine, vellum the VMS is made from (the
term uterine is slightly misleading because although such fine vellum could
be made from aborted calves it was economically wasteful and the majority of
so-called uterine vellum was in fact very very finely pared down parchment).
Personally I find it exceptionally difficult to imagine the quantity needed
for the VMS could have lain around for any length of time.

One the other hand, if the VMS was produced on recycled quires I’d expect it
to show evidence of it being a palimpsest, which it does not.

While it is true that occasionally a sheet or two did escape use and even
survive to modern times, it was only the odd sheet here and there and most
of these were ones in private hands that’d been bought and never used; so I
feel that loose sheets surviving any length of time in a stationers, if it
happened, must have been rare. The VMS’s vellum seems from the SIDs, with
the exception of the Rosettes fold-out page, to all be of a type; very fine
high quality semi-transparent vellum. But if someone were collecting “old”
sheets from here and there to make the 116+ sheets (remember there are pages
and two quires missing) then I’d expect it to be a mixture of parchment,
vellum, and skunk vellum; which is not the case.

By the 15thC Paper had replaced prepared hides which became rare in
stationers’ stock, but could be produced for made to order for commissioned
works.

Make of all that what thou wilt.

All facts quoted originated in the following tomes;

Scribes and Illuminators (Medieval Craftsmen) by Christopher de Hamel ISBN
978-0714120492
Medieval Illuminators & their Methods of Work by J J G Alexander ISBN
0-300-06073-4
Introduction to Manuscript Studies by R Clemens & T Graham ISBN
978-0-8014-8708-8
The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books (12th to 16thC) by A Derolez
ISBN 978-0-521-68690-7
The Book Before Printing by D Diringer ISBN 0-486-24243-9
Latin Palaeography by B Bishop ISBN 0-521-36726-3
An Introduction to Greek & Latin Palaeography by Sir E M Thompson

http://www.villaggiomedievale.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=571&whichpage=2

It does seem logical. With the advent of Universities and a need for more texts in the !3th Century, professors would give a text to Stationarii to have copied. To make this quicker and easier a text was ‘divided’ into ‘pecia’ and each transcriber would be given one to copy. When each pecia that formed the text had been completed it would be bound into a book, so it would have been much simpler to give a quaderno to a copier to ‘fill in’ ( the length of the text and the size of the letters would be visible on the original). Surely someone wanting to buy parchment would go to this same supplier ( stationarii) rather than a merchant selling rolls of parchment ( which would also give less useful offcuts – usally consumed by notaries and the likefor single page documents).

Here is also another interesting link which lists criteria used to form a codex according to it’s utility

http://www.medievista.it/codici/libro.html

You have to be very careful about this: in order to confound the applicability of the dating evidence, people will want to suggest that the vellum could have been stored for a decade or a century before being used. My historical instinct is that vellum would only have been stored flat or in rolls by a commercial parchment maker for a relatively short period of time (a month? two months?), and that where it survived for longer periods of time it would have been sold and cut (and perhaps even sewn or glued into quaderni, as you say) and held by a buyer.

Paper was not a fringe purchase. Cicco Simonetta’s Sforza chancellery famous consumed mountains of paper (not vellum) circa 1450-1470, and its approach to administration (and to ciphers, too) was much admired and copied throughout Italy. People tend to think of there having been only a few (pre-1500) incunabula, but this was not true: and 99.9%+ of incunabula were printed on paper, with just a handful of show copies printed on parchment. Many people also started keeping paper diaries 1400-1500, because they could now afford to. Parchment was nice, for sure: but paper quickly came to rule the roost.

Cheers, …Nick Pelling…