Some nice manuscript-related links…
Just as it says on the tin title, here are some nice manuscript-related links for you. 
First off, I didn’t know until very recently that there was a Wikipedia entry on manuscript culture, which contains all kinds of manuscript-related bits and pieces (it puts the decline in trade for parchminers circa 1500, for example). However, I have to say that this whole account is constructed around an old-fashioned, rather brutally sequential model of how books linearly took over from manuscripts and thus caused the Renaissance, etc etc, which I don’t buy into even slightly. It seems (from the final section) that this is from the influence of historian Elizabeth Eisenstein: so, as with most things Wikipedian, “interesting, but ingest with caution“.
Secondly, here’s a EU collaborative website telling you (pretty much) everything you need to know about iron gall ink corrosion (yes, really), including chemistry, historical recipes and conservation strategies. There’s also an iron gall ink corrosion discussion list you can subscribe to… for myself, I wasn’t particularly tempted to join, but you might be.
Thirdly, here’s a nicely detailed page on vellum / parchment manufacture by SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) member Meliora di Curci, part of “The Royal College and Confraternity of Scribes and Illuminators of the Kingdom of Lochac“. All hail King Bran and Queen Lilya!
Fourthly, courtesy of the Department of Medieval Studies at the Central European University in Budapest comes a really rather nice Medieval Manuscript Manual. Though I originally downloaded a PDF version of this from somewhere, the current version is all in HTML: there are also Italian, Russian and (unsurprisingly) Hungarian translations on the same site. What is so pleasant about this is that it floats in a sea of physical terms: brindle, piebald (from which we get “—bald eagle”), wing pinion, barbs, gall wasps, dangling weights on a sloping desk, pumice, gesso, dog’s tooth mounted on a handle, miniver / calaber tail hair clippings, dragons’ (and elephants’!) blood, tumsole, sturgeon’s air bladder… enjoy!
